Paul Douglas and James Brolan
Paul Anthony Douglas (1957 – 29 May 2006) · James Brolan (7 April 1964 – 29 May 2006)
CBS News · Killed by a remotely detonated car bomb while reporting in Baghdad, Iraq
The Journalists
Paul Douglas and James Brolan were London-based British journalists whose work was usually done outside the frame. Douglas, a CBS News cameraman, and Brolan, a sound engineer working with CBS, spent their careers helping correspondents bring viewers into places most people could not safely go. By the time they arrived in Baghdad in May 2006, both men had years of experience in conflict zones and had earned the trust of colleagues who depended on their judgment, courage, and calm under pressure.
Douglas had been with CBS News since the early 1990s, roughly seventeen years, after starting out at ITN in Britain. He began as a sound man and then moved to the camera, and the assignments took him to many of the major conflicts of his generation: the siege of Sarajevo in 1993 and 1994, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally Iraq. He often worked alongside CBS anchor Dan Rather, who reported with Douglas from Afghanistan, Israel, and Iraq
One story from Sarajevo followed Douglas the rest of his career. A sound engineer at the start, Douglas was an attentive listener to everything around him, so it was no surprise that he heard an incoming shell before anyone else did. As it fell, he rolled over to shield Rather from the blast. When Rather later asked why he had risked his life, Douglas answered simply:
“We look after one another. We cover for each other.”
As his years with CBS went on, Douglas wanted to move from sound to the camera itself. He was a lifelong tinkerer—a car and motorcycle restorer in his spare time—and he was not intimidated by the mechanics of a new craft. He studied it, taught himself, and began taking on more assignments as a camera operator. Working with correspondent Mark Phillips aboard RFA Sir Galahad near the start of the Iraq war in 2003, Douglas filmed an approaching ship without knowing whether it was hostile or friendly, and he kept rolling. Fortunately, the ship turned out to be friendly, but Douglas’s unflinching posture the entire time confirmed to Phillips what kind of cameraman Douglas had become:
“You could have just run his tape raw on the air. And I remember thinking: Paul has become one of the really good ones.”
Brolan came to the work from a different direction. He grew up in Holloway, in north London, and before journalism he served in the British Army, including tours in Northern Ireland between 1983 and 1988. That was where he first saw sustained violence up close. He went on to work as a freelance sound technician, and where Douglas had a long history with a single network, Brolan brought wide experience across assignments and news organizations. He worked with Bob Woodruff at ABC News—the same Woodruff who would be gravely wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq in January 2006, four months before Brolan was killed. Brolan was part of the CBS team that covered the 2005 Kashmir earthquake in Pakistan. That coverage won the Overseas Press Club’s David Kaplan Award—named for the ABC News producer killed by a sniper in Sarajevo while traveling with Sam Donaldson—which Brolan received barely a month before he died.
The Final Story
On Memorial Day, 29 May 2006, Douglas and Brolan were in Baghdad with CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier, embedded with the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division. The assignment that morning was a holiday feature, a look at how American troops were spending Memorial Day far from home. Instead, the patrol they were with made a stop in the Karrada district to inspect a checkpoint that had been bombed the day before.
The crew was outside their vehicle, in protective gear, when a car packed with roughly 500 pounds of explosives was remotely detonated. Douglas and Brolan were killed, along with the unit’s commander, Captain James “Alex” Funkhouser, and an Iraqi translator known to the crew as Sam. Dozier, walking just behind them, was critically wounded; six American soldiers were also hurt. Subsequent accounts found security planning and communications failures that may have contributed to the crew’s exposure.
Dozier survived, and after a long recovery, wrote about the attack in her 2008 memoir, Breathing the Fire. She has also spoken about the survivor’s guilt she carried and the legacy of the colleagues she lost.
Legacy
Douglas and Brolan died during what had already become one of the deadliest conflicts ever for journalists and media workers. By the time they were killed, the Committee to Protect Journalists counted 71 journalists and 26 media support workers dead in the conflict, a toll that Reporters Without Borders called the worst for the profession since the Second World War. CBS News president Sean McManus described Iraq at the time as “the most dangerous place on Earth right now.”
In Britain, the manner of Douglas’s death drew an unusual official rebuke. In August 2007 a British coroner ruled it an unlawful killing: a formal judgment that the violence he met on the job was a crime, not a misfortune of war. The names of both men were added to the journalists’ memorial in Bayeux, France, dedicated the day before World Press Freedom Day in 2007, and their families attended the opening. Their names also appear on the Guardians of Truth monument in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, unveiled in 2024 to honor journalists killed while covering conflict in Iraq, and St. Bride’s Church in London
Paul Douglas was survived by his wife, Linda, their two daughters, Kelly and Joanne, and three grandchildren. James Brolan was survived by his wife, Geri, who died from cancer in 2015, and their two children, Sam and Agatha.