Zuokas graduated from the first secondary school in Jonava. He then worked as an independent reporter for Independent Television News as a war reporter in Iraq, where he taped the bombing of the Baghdad TV Tower during the First Gulf War. In August 1991, he brought recently captured footage from the site of the Medininkai massacre to the official meeting between the president of the United States George H. W. Bush and Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, which caused concern from the American side about the use of force against freedom-seeking nations.