Here we go again. Once there was an appeal for more good news from my well-meaning erstwhile BBC colleague Martyn Lewis, then demands for the journalism of attachment during the horrors of Bosnia. Now there is peace journalism the most pernicious of the lot, especially since it is so well funded, academically backed and superficially attractive.
I mean we are all in favour of peace, arent we? So lets seek out peacemakers, report the middle ground, and isolate the men of violence. It sounds sweet, and it sticks to your fingers like jam. It should be chewed up and spat out.
I want to appeal for more traditional values such as fairness, objectivity and balance the only guiding lights of good reporting. News is whats happening and we should report it with imagination and scepticism (where appropriate). Full stop. We do not need to load any other demands on to it. And we certainly do not need to seek out peacemakers unless they are actually successful.
Good journalism: plausible manner, a little literary ability, rat-like cunning
I once heard the high priest of peace journalism Johan Galtung berating the press for ignoring a Balkans peace plan put forward by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar in 1991. It was not us who did not take it seriously. It was Milosevic and his mad Serb nationalist proxies who were busy provoking a war. Lets get cause and effect the right way round. The peace plan was not dead in the water because it was not reported. It was not reported because it was seen to be dead in the water.
Galtungs track record at conflict resolution is admirable. But he misunderstands our role. We are always outside observers not players. His demand that journalists should become active participants, seeing every conflict is as a complicated matrix, echoed in a series of manuals by the Reporting the World group in Britain, is wrong. Anyway it would have every viewer or listener reaching for the off button.
I fear that this is turning into a new orthodoxy, with peace journalism modules attached to media studies courses; and it should be resisted. The new orthodoxy draws journalists in as active participants, compromising their integrity and confusing their role.
I am not arguing against proper ethical standards, nor responsible journalism. Of course, we are not cold neutral unseen eyes. But our task is always to seek to find out what is going on, not carrying any other baggage. If there is conflict resolution we report on it in context. We do not engage in it.
The way we have been reporting up to now is not that bad. The existing structure laws and codes of conduct by trade unions and responsible employers which we live and work in provides a framework which proscribes what we cannot do banning the unacceptable.
The peace journalism option presents a uniquely unhelpful and misleading view of journalism in general, and broadcast journalism in particular, because it seeks a prescription, defining a way of working which demands that reporters work artificially to seek out peacemakers.
This would matter all the time because of its potentially distorting effect on the news agenda. It matters even more now as it looks as if we are heading for an offensive war against Iraq, with unpredictable consequences for violence across the region. The established values of fairness, objectivity and balance are needed more than ever, deployed with the rat-like cunning said to be one of the only three qualifications necessary for a journalist (the others being a plausible manner and a little literary ability).
We need to be extraordinarily wary of spin, or propaganda as its called in wartime. And it will only be found out with good journalism. Nato learnt the lesson that it has to tell the truth, not from incisive questions by well-briefed defence correspondents at news conferences, but because of the brutal reality that somebody out there always has a camera.
If they bomb refugee convoys, civilian trains, and TV stations as they did in Kosovo, or bakeries, orphanages, Red Cross warehouses, and TV stations (again) as in Afghanistan, then this cannot be denied because some local snapper, or freelance who has broken out of the pool will be there to film it.
That is not easy. It is messy, difficult, arduous, hazardous, and expensive. But that is the business of real reporting, which has no place in the theoretical constructs of peace journalism.
Resisting the temptation to participate
As big public relations firms in London and Washington line up for fat contracts, watch out for stories like the tale of the Kuwaiti babies ripped out of incubators by Iraqi invaders in 1990. It never happened. It was just made up for a press conference. But it is not new.
The cartoons of big, bearded huns with spiked helmets skewering Belgian babies on their bayonets stiffened sinews in 1914. In the next few weeks there will be more emphasis on Halabja the village massacred by the Iraqis in 1988.
I remember it well, because I happened to do the story. (It wasnt anything clever. I was on shift when the pictures came in on a satellite feed. I covered it from the safety of TV centre.) And I remember the pathetic Iranians and Kurds standing outside the Foreign Office for months afterwards with petitions and horrific albums of victims. But nobody cared certainly not the government. It was only on the news for one day. It was an oddity the use of chemical weapons towards the end of a war in which a million died.
But now 15 years later it has propaganda value. Iraqs use of chemical weapons against its own people is mentioned every day, and in the next few weeks the sacrifice of Halabja will achieve iconic status. And if we are not actually at war on the anniversary, 16 March, then watch for a moving memorial lecture from Washington. We need sharp forensic weapons to cope with this world, not an ethical checklist from peace journalism academics.
News is what matters, what gets into the political bloodstream, what counts. Politicians dont have to agree with it, but if they take notice then its a story. It can be jagged and visceral and uncomfortable and sometimes it does not work. Every reporter has had the unnerving experience of the exclusive story, which dies a death because it is not followed up. It does not have any meaning or context. I am sure that is where the demand for a journalism of attachment emerged from in the mid-1990s in Bosnia.
The political establishment in America and Europe did not want to get involved, so they wrote it off as a Balkan tragedy where ancient ethnic hatreds had been awakened. The spin from inside government blocking engagement was a powerful vaccine against stories of the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the unravelling of civil society.
So even though they had got their message across loud and clear, the journalists were frustrated. Their reporting was not having any effect. They wanted to be liberated from the yoke of objectivity to be allowed to tell it as it is to take a position condemning the Serbs. It was always an elitist demand, giving a special licence to the few.
By contrast in Kosovo only a few years later, Nato bombed the Serbs after only a few massacres. A highly effective guerrilla campaign by the Kosovars secured the end of Serb control because of the willingness of Europe to become engaged militarily. There were no demands for journalism of attachment from the reporters who covered Kosovo.
The significance of the Kosovo Liberation Army was quite how skilfully they played the media game. They did not kill that many people, and their targets were mostly Serbian and Yugoslav security forces. They assessed that Nato would intervene if the Serbs retaliated, which they duly did.
This calculation by rebel groups of the effect of international television, particularly the BBC and CNN, is a new factor. It has been most comprehensively examined by Nik Gowing in his important analysis of the coverage of the humanitarian crisis which followed the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
He writes of the challenge faced by policymakers when confronted by sophisticated media campaigns by killers who know how their actions are playing in real time. He found that journalists and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) alike were ill-equipped to deal with the situation, lacking a similar narrative to compare it with. Gowing writes tellingly of the template imposed on to the story which did not fit, so that the usually symbiotic relationship in the field between journalists and aid workers broke down amid mutual hostility.
We must always resist the temptation to become drawn in as participants. The desire to impose a template is only another device to try to make the world comprehensible. Like soldiers equipped to fight the last war, we approach new situations knowing only what we have seen before.
I remember cringing slightly at the start of the Kosovo campaign, hearing an ex-political prisoner who was a founding father of the Albanian cause described as the Nelson Mandela of the Balkans. But the reporter had the right intentions. We strive all the time to help the audience understand.
Different war, same plot
I share the feeling of the greatest correspondent of them all, Martha Gellhorn who wrote that: There is a single plot in war; action is based on homelessness, fear, pain and death. Starving wounded children were the same. Refugees, dragging themselves and whatever they could carry from war to no safety, were one people all over the globe. The shapeless bundle of a dead American soldier was like any other soldiers corpse in any other country.
Writing through the dark days of the 1930s and the Second World War she called foreign correspondents a Federation of Cassandras whom I met at every disaster.
The thing that makes me most angry about the tendentious arguments of the new orthodoxy of peace journalism is the claim that reporters who cover wars are somehow unhealthily addicted to violence, putting too much of it in front of the audience.
This is based on hope that the world could be a better place than it is, and on the flawed notion that the world would be a better place if we did not report wars, or if we were to report wars in a certain prescribed way, encouraging peacemakers rather than reporting warriors. This is the most dangerous part of the new orthodoxy.
If anything we under-report conflict in the world certainly often failing to expose it in the early days, before major violence breaks out. Surely it is better to pick up the stone and find out what lives under there in darkness. Conflict does not stop in the places we do not report much at the moment.
What about Somalia, Abkhazia, Chechnya, Guinea, Liberia, Burundi, the seven nation war in Congo? We in the British media should have spent more effort on testing the claims and counter-claims over child deaths in Iraq, a country which has been bombed nightly by our planes out of sight of our cameras for a decade. And yes, as well as forgotten wars there is forgotten peace.
The peace and reconciliation process inside Rwanda, including public village confessions, has not had enough international attention. The media caravan has moved on and just maybe there would have been more progress under the spotlight of scrutiny. But we do not do too badly. Speaking for myself, in 2002 I went to more African countries heading towards peace than making war. It was not a deliberate policy. It seemed to be the story.
Witness not actor
Our job as reporters is only to be witnesses to the truth. There cannot of course be a single absolute truth anyone who has ever interviewed two observers of the same incident knows that there is no perfect account but once we step away from pursuing the truth, then we are lost in an area of moral relativism which threatens the whole business of reporting.
When the Russians raced into Kosovo after the Nato bombing campaign and seized the airport in a sneak raid, a British and a Russian journalist would have covered the event completely differently. There is no objective truth but both would search for objectivity in their own terms, and in the terms understood by their viewers, listeners or readers.
And that objectivity has to remain a goal, the only sacred goal we have. Just pursuing the ideal is enough, although we know, because of the shifting sand that we live on, that an absolute objectivity is impossible. Reporters live in a social context and share a language and certain assumptions with their audience.
But both the reporter and the audience need to know that there is no other agenda that what you see on the screen or hear on the radio is an honest attempt at objectivity; that reporters treat any and every event with an informed scepticism, rejecting any attempt to co-opt them into involvement.
This approach is not dispassionate. It can be hugely passionate, requiring emotional engagement and human imagination. But it is not about my passion, how I feel. The viewer or listener does not want to know how I feel, but how people feel on the ground.
Reporters are the channel for their passion not active players. In the world of press conferences and media opportunities which surround us, the only reporting which matters is off-piste finding out what is really going on. And there is simply not enough of it around. Peace journalism would fence it in with an ethical framework and reduce it even more.
I am with the war photographer Guthrie, in Tom Stoppards play Night and Day, who says, Ive been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But its worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light. Thats all you can say really.
