War and Peacekeeping by Martin Bell

Author:Martin Bell [Bell, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2020-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

I was trained in a tradition of dispassionate and objective journalism. I believed in it. I don’t believe in it any more. 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 . . . In proposing an alternative journalism – one that is both balanced and principled – I am 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 ours especially, because we were the independent witnesses . . . This new way of working is something that I call, for want of a better term, the journalism of attachment. It does not take sides, any more than the Red Cross takes sides, or back one people or army or faction against another. It is not in the backing business. It is in 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.7

I might have added, in view of later developments, that there was no need either to stand equidistant between racism and tolerance, between dictatorship and democracy, or (especially in Northern Ireland) between a violent past and a more peaceful future. I rather fancied the idea of becoming a peace correspondent. Indifference – passing by on the other side – is a curse and a scourge. Albinoni’s Adagio was our anthem, played on the streets of Sarajevo by the city’s musicians in June 1992 on the day that Douglas Hurd came to visit, as chairman of the European Council of Ministers, telling the Bosnians that they should not expect an outside intervention.

David Owen, another negotiator caught in the middle, believed that the BBC and Agence France-Presse, among others, struck a fair balance. But he added:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.