Jakub Szántó: War Reporting

Czech Television correspondent Jakub Szántó will discuss the work of a war correspondent: how to film under fire, what technologies enable live broadcasts from an ongoing conflict, whether journalists carry weapons, where to find food during Ramadan in the middle of war, and the role of public media. He will screen reports created under maximum pressure and share stories from his reporting.

Szántó has worked as a television correspondent since 1999 – first at TV Nova, and since 2006 at Czech Television. Between 2013 and 2018, he served as its first permanent correspondent in the Middle East. He is a laureate of the "Journalist Prize 2014" for his coverage of the Maidan revolution in Ukraine and since 2017 also of the "Peroutka Prize". For his book "Behind the Veil of War" (Argo, 2018), he received the readers' award "Magnesia Litera" in 2019.

His other books include "From Israel with Love" (2020) on Israeli-Palestinian history and contemporary affairs, the collective publication "Putin's War" (Argo, 2023) capturing the first year of war in Ukraine through the eyes of Czech Television correspondents, and his most recent solo book "Between the Millstones: Gaza and Its Story" (Argo, 2025) devoted to the history of Gaza.