Debating the “journalism of attachment”
BBC Radio Ulster, 4 March 2012
On Sunday 4 March, I debated the former BBC journalist and Independent MP Martin Bell on Sunday Sequence on BBC Radio Ulster. The debate was triggered by an article I wrote for ABC News in Australia about the death of the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin in Syria. The presenter was William Crawley. A transcript of the debate is published below.
William Crawley: Just what is the role of the modern-day journalist? A person who chronicles events and simplifies complicated issues for a mass audience? Or is it to be a fearless crusader, telling ‘the right side’ of the story? Those are lines that often are increasingly blurred. What about the late Marie Colvin, who was killed by Syrian rocket attacks just a couple of weeks ago? Did she cross that line? spiked editor Brendan O’Neill has written about Marie Colvin. Martin Bell, you remember well as the white-suited correspondent who reported on conflicts across the world for many years before becoming an Independent MP. Good morning to you both, welcome to Sunday Sequence. Brendan, let me put that question directly to you about Marie Colvin. Do you think she did cross that line?
Brendan O’Neill: Well, I think Marie Colvin was definitely what we would call an ‘attached journalist’. She saw herself very much not simply as a reporter but almost as a campaigner, someone who could encourage intervention. Someone who could reshape conflicts and make them go in a different direction. So she clearly saw herself as someone who was more than an individual simply reporting facts. She was someone who wanted to change the shape of the conflict in which she was reporting.
William Crawley: There’s nothing new, Martin Bell, about campaigning journalism, is there?
Martin Bell: No, I suppose William Howard Russell, the founding father of what he called the ‘luckless tribe’ of war reporters, was implicitly a campaigning journalist in The Times in the Crimean War and he was just pointing out the sad deficiencies of medical treatment and supply. It wasn’t editorial, but the mere publication of the facts had a powerful effect and actually brought down a government.
William Crawley: There is a difficult line to be drawn though, isn’t there, between ‘attached’ and ‘detached’ journalism. How would you draw that line, Brendan? And how do you evaluate the crossing of it morally, from a journalistic point of view?
Brendan O’Neill: Well, yes, there have always been journalists who have campaigned on issues and whose facts themselves have led to change. But what I’m talking about in relation to the journalism of attachment, which really comes about during the Bosnia conflict, is the idea that conflicts around the world can be squeezed into a template of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. That you can reduce very complex, very strange, very nuanced wars in some parts of the world to black-and-white, good-and-evil dichotomy, and I think that’s the sort of journalism that, sadly, Marie Colvin and many others practice today. I just think it is that kind of campaigning that is problematic, as it mean that journalists will firstly miss the nuance and miss what’s actually historically specific about various conflicts, and secondly that they run the danger of making themselves party to a conflict by taking one side against the other and campaigning for Western intervention on the side of the ones that they have deemed to be good.
William Crawley: So that takes us on, Martin, from ‘attached journalism’, campaigning journalism, to now partisan journalism.
Martin Bell: I’m absolutely against partisan journalism. I did advance in the Bosnian war the theory which I called the ‘journalism of attachment’ – a journalism that cares as well as knows. It was set around with all kinds of qualifications, like meticulous attention to the details, seeking out supposed bad guys, explaining what’s happening, why they’re doing what they’re doing. I think this is an artificial distinction. I don’t know what Brendan’s experience of warzones is, but suppose I’d been in Shankill in October 1969 or Lenadoon in Belfast in July 1972 and there was something like a war going on around me. Should I be indifferent to the plight of the people caught up in it? Absolutely not.
William Crawley: There is a difference between detachment and indifference, Brendan?
Brendan O’Neill: No one should be indifferent; everyone is human. But historically, the role of journalists in wars was to report what they saw and to report the facts. Now we have journalists who, even before they go to a conflict zone, have decided which side is good, which side is bad, which side they will take. More importantly than that – and this is the key distinction – they now campaign for Western intervention into these conflicts. And there are other journalists out there – I am one of them – who happen to think that Western intervention makes things worse, as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else; intervention intensifies the conflict. So what it means is that journalists are playing a very problematic role in which they are effectively taking the side of the ‘international community’, as they call it, or the West, as I call it. And that means that there is a real danger that they will become targets, particularly in regimes that do not want the international community’s intervention, which do not want Western intervention. If they see journalists as these kind of moral scribes who are there on behalf of the West and who are calling for intervention, then they are going to treat those journalists as combatants, which I think is a very problematic and really quite tragic development in journalism.
William Crawley: Well, of course, as Martin Bell knows very personally, you don’t have to go that far to be treated as a combatant, do you?
Martin Bell: No. Journalism in terms of conflict is more dangerous now than it ever was. It all changed in 9/11, but this is no reason for us to retreat from the field. I mean one of these bizarre, sort of neo-Marxist websites I see has been accusing me of being responsible for Marie Colvin’s death. Well, for heaven’s sake, she was a very independent-minded individual who took her own risks. And if these terrible scenes are going on around her, it’s quite human, I think, actually, to want to end them. And the idea that Western intervention always fails, well, the NATO intervention in Bosnia in 1995 actually brought the war to an end and saved a lot of lives. So every case is different and I think we have to be very scrupulous about the facts, but not be indifferent. And we should care. Because these are human beings and the longer I did this war reporting, the less I was interested in orders of battle and logistics and the more I was interested in effects on people.
William Crawley: At the danger, Martin, of overly dignifying those comments on that website, why were you being accused?
Martin Bell: Erm, I think he has quite insulted dear, dear Marie. I think that somebody on one of these websites thought that she was following my journalism of attachment. She was a very independent-spirited person, obviously she worked with the parameters set out by The Sunday Times, but she’d take advice from absolutely nobody I’m sure, except her editor, quite properly.
William Crawley: Brendan, isn’t it right – and we can go back to lots of conflicts, the Second World War, even before Martin’s historical examples… isn’t it right when journalists see something they believe to be worth heralding to the world, an injustice, an inhumanity and they see innocent people being trammelled across by the wheel of history, isn’t it right that they should shout from the rooftops?
Brendan O’Neill: Well, they should report it, and they should report it as colourfully and as factually as they can, that’s absolutely correct. But what happens with the journalism of attachment, what happens when you go into this good-and-evil mindset, is that you shout from the rooftops about the suffering of the people you have decreed to be good and you tend to ignore the suffering of the people you have decreed to be bad. The best example of this is in the war that Martin just mentioned, the Bosnian War in the 1990s, when the suffering of the Bosnian Muslims, which was immense, was shouted from the rooftops at every opportunity, but the suffering of the Bosnian Serbs, which was also pretty immense, tended to be ignored. The best example being the expulsion of 200,000 Krajina Serbs during the conflict, which was largely ignored by journalists who had already decided that the Bosnian Serbs were ‘evil’ and that they needed Western intervention to put them back in their place. And what’s more that it was the role of journalists to get that intervention going. So there’s a real danger that if you see things in terms of black and white, good and evil, you will only take the side of the suffering of the people that you like. And you will ignore the very human suffering of the people you dislike.
William Crawley: Martin, how do you square that circle?
Martin Bell: If he only reads what I wrote about the Bosnian War towards the end of my memoir, which is being republished in April, there’s quite a long section about the Bosnian Serbs and how many of them died and how it was often done out of sight of the cameras. I mean, I went out of my way to point this out, and I don’t think Brendan or anyone else can quote a single word of mine which fits with this caricature I’m now hearing from him.
William Crawley: You never believed you were a campaigner?
Martin Bell: No, I drew attention to the facts. The facts were intolerable. But there’s a distinction between the intention and the effect. If the effect of your reporting is to stop these things from happening, well that’s all to the good. All you can do – and I’m sure Brendan wouldn’t disagree with this – is to point out the facts on the ground and do it very fairly on both sides as far as you are able. But then the people can draw their own conclusions.
William Crawley: And the other thing that’s important, Brendan, is that journalists when they do drive a particular campaign or take a position on something, they should label their product, shouldn’t they? They should make it clear this is their personal view?
Brendan O’Neill: I think so, yes. And the problem with the journalism of attachment – and this went across the board with a great number of journalists who reported from Bosnia and subsequent wars – is that they presented their own moral worldview as a factual one. They presented their moral interpretation of conflicts, their quite conscious taking of sides, as all the facts that everyone needed to know. Which is a really dangerous thing to do because it gives rise to a very skewed understanding of these wars. The best example again is the Bosnia conflict, which was an extremely confusing, complicated conflict between two or three sides at different times, yet which came to be understood by many in the West as a simple case of the Nazi Serbs attacking innocent people. Because it was portrayed as such by attached journalists. And I think we’re going through the same problem in relation to Syria, where the Assad regime is no doubt a barbaric regime and we all want to see it gone, but to present that conflict as a very simple one between an evil regime and good guys is really problematic, and we need to tease out the nuances of what’s really happening.
William Crawley: Brendan O’Neill from the spiked website, and Martin Bell the former BBC journalist, thank you very much for your comments this morning.
Listen to the recording here (starts 10 minutes in).
