Just a few weeks before he would receive the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of the Iraq war, Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid delivered the 2004 Joe Alex Morris, Jr., Memorial Lecture at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

His fundamental question: "How do we guard against danger without sealing ourselves off?"

Shadid worries about journalists traveling with armed guards and living behind concrete barricades.

"We're cut off from the very city we cover. The psychological barriers are my greatest fear. Since they affect the very nature of our reporting, there's always this question of sentiments, and I think sentiments since the start of the conflict have been the great unknown. Is it occupation or liberation? Is it freedom or is it something short of that? I don't know that we've seen the long-term implications of our growing isolation."

Shadid, of course, provides an understated answer to the conundrum he presents in his own approach to reporting, which is enormously evocative, dogged – and accomplished without armed guards or pyrotechnics.

Here is the full text of his lecture: http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/events/honors/morris/SHADID_Morris.html

Dan Froomkin is the deputy editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project. He is also Senior Washington Correspondent for the Huffington Post. E-mail: froomkin@niemanwatchdog.org

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