← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC World Service FOOC
00:09:03
The Truth is Our Currency Owen Bennett Jones introduces an archive despatch from 1997...
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You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. We make an edition of the program for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service. It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.
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This week we're seeing what our colleagues were saying in years gone by and wondering whether their pearls of wisdom have lessons for us today. Martin Bell was the BBC's man in Washington, and he also covered a whole series of wars in including the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. He went on to become an independent member of Parliament in Britain. Well, in the 90s, he took a forensic look at the journalism business. As a BBC correspondent, he'd been trained to be objective. But with years of reporting experience behind him, he came to wonder what that meant and whether in fact it could even be achieved.
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I'm going to talk about what I know about, which is TV news. It is the most powerful news medium yet devised. It reaches every day into all our homes. It chronicles and conditions and even decides the rise and fall of governments. Generals adjust their strategies to take account of it. Even diplomats have occasionally been moved because of it to take some action that they would not otherwise have taken. And yet, if on a broad definition you reckon the concept of news to be 2000 and more years old and to have begun with conquerors like Alexander the Great who took a historian to the wars with them, or like Julius Caesar, who wrote up their victories themselves, then on that timescale, TV news has been with us for not much more than the twinkling of an eye. Let me start with a heresy. I was trained in a tradition of objective and dispassionate journalism. I believed in it. I don't believe in it anymore. But from where I have been since and what I have seen, I would describe it as a sort of bystanders journalism, unequal to the challenges of the times. What I do believe in still, and hold fast to more than ever, is fairness and impartiality and a scrupulous attention to the facts and a determination to pay heed to the unpopular spokesman of unfavoured causes. Good journalism has nothing to do with fashion or the opinions prevailing among other journalists. It requires a certain drive and bloody mindedness, but objective. I am not sure what it means. I see nothing object like in the relationship between the reporter and the event. Rather, I use my eyes and ears and mind and store of experience, which is surely the very essence of the subjective. As for dispassionate, there is a time for passion and a time for dispassion. It is a matter of tact and taste and good sense, and getting the feelings right as well as the facts. And I would not report a man made calamity the effects of war massacre in the way that would be appropriate to a more routine news event, a royal tour, a ministerial news conference, or an exchange of parliamentary insults. In the past, I think that we erred on the side of aloofness and unwarranted detachment. The tone was often misplaced, and so was the accent. In broadcast news, what you say can sometimes be no more important than how you say it, at least in the negative sense, that it can be ruined by how you say it. When TV news began in the mid-50s, it inherited from the cinema newsreels the only model. It had a magisterial manner and a newsreader's delivery, couched in the cut glass accents of the upper classes, which were thought in those days to carry the stamp of authority. These days we do things differently. I've been accused of many things in my time, but never of talking posh. I was a corporal once, and the army knew an other rank when it saw one. You may wonder about the notion of balance and whether that still applies. The answer is yes, but only if you take a balanced view of it. Yes, because fairness and impartiality remain our abiding principles. And besides, in our coverage of domestic politics, they are obligations laid on us quite properly by law. But with all this said and done, there is also such a thing as a phoney balance, a lazy shuffling of thesis and antithesis. A parody of this would be on the one hand, Hitler persecuted the Jews, but on the other, didn't he just revive the German economy? That's a setting up of false equivalencies. Or, to save ourselves trouble, we can report the truth, balance it out with a denial of the truth, and conclude with some dumb bromide like one thing is certain, only time will tell. If you ever hear that particular construction, my advice is to switch off immediately. It is a clear sign that the reporter's brain is not in gear, if he or she ever had one, and if it ever was. In proposing an alternative journalism, one which is both balanced and principled, I'm not so much calling for a change as describing one that has already taken place. It had to. How else, for instance, were we to report on genocide? Were we to observe it from afar, pass by on the other side and declare that it was none of our business? It was all of our business, perhaps especially ours, because we were the Independent witnesses. And if genocide would not move us, nothing would move us. And what would that then say of us? This new way of working is something that I call, for want of a better term, the journalism of attachment. It doesn't take sides or back one people or army or faction against another. It is not in the backing business, but the truth telling business. It is a journalism which is aware of the moral ground on which it operates, which cares as well as knows and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, the victim and the oppressor. It knows that, especially in television. We are not apart from the world, we are a part of it. What we do has consequences. And we have to know that the consequences may be for better or for worse. And we have to know that too. I will tell you a story about this. It is a story from Sarajevo, which I hope is apocryphal, but believe is not. It is about a newspaper reporter who wished to write a profile of a frontline sniper. It doesn't matter on which side the sniper operated, because both sides had them and each side feared the others as much as it valued its own. The reporter made the necessary arrangements with the man's commander and visited the front line. The sniper was peering out from between two bricks in his forward defences. The reporter asked, what do you see? The sniper replied, I see two people walking in the street. Which of them do you want me to shoot? It was at this point that the reporter realized too late that he had embarked on a project that was inherently lethal and that he should not even have considered. He pleaded with the sniper to shoot. Neither of them made his excuses and turned to leave. As he did so, he heard two shots from the position just behind him. He turned and looked. That was a pity, said the sniper. You could have saved one of their lives. I quote this story because it seems to me, even at the theoretical level, to dispose of the fiction of the reporter as neutral observer, the candle holder who looks on even in print, but especially in television. We are certainly not that. Yet it is an attractive fiction, carefree burden, free and easy to live with to those who wish to believe in it. And it connects in an interesting way with the issue of censorship. By this I don't mean censorship by governments or armies. I mean the good taste censorship that we in television impose on ourselves, cutting out images of violence and bloodshed in order not to disturb people. Let me just make the point here that the relatively benign and altered landscape which we present in TV news is one in which the old style of neutral and Dispassionate journalism can operate quite comfortably. No need to be unflinching, because nothing is left that it has to flinch from. No need to be compassionate, because nothing is left that it has to care about what? What remains. Neither violence nor bloodshed, nor suffering, nor grief, but only a passing show, an acceptable spectacle. There are issues here that seem to me worth raising. Is objectivity desirable or even possible? Should it be our imperative in a dangerous and turbulent world, simply not to upset people? What do we as journalists actually believe in, beyond the empty ambition of appearing on television, since, whether we like it or not, we are participants of a sort and are going to make some kind of a difference, what exactly do we want that difference to be? And what can be the justification for a disengaged journalism which would require its practitioners, as special people with special privileges, to close their hearts to pity? That is a phrase with a certain historical resonance. There was, in this century, a military commander who urged his generals to do just that, to close their hearts to pity. He enjoyed a measure of success for a while. His name was Adolf Hitler.
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Martin Bell, in characteristic form, asking difficult questions about television journalism and covering wars. And the answers are no more apparent today than when he was writing back in 1997. And that's it for now. Tomorrow here on the BBC World Service, we'll hear from Kevin Connolly, who in 1994 travelled deep inside the Arctic Circle to a city built in Soviet times by prisoners and which today has become something of a prison to those living there.