When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  His report, ‘Forcing a Peace’, shown to millions of primetime TV viewers, had an immediate impact in Britain.

  Peter McKay of the London Evening Standard admitted he didn’t see it ‘but everyone is talking about it. Mr Bell’s report – according to all I have spoken to who saw it – more or less said: “Right, let’s go.”’538

  Andrew Marr in The Independent had seen it, called it ‘the strongest, most harrowing piece of filmed journalism yet to come out of Bosnia’ and was in no doubt about Bell’s message: ‘“Peace-making has failed. Negotiation has failed. Diplomacy has failed…” Then he called for military intervention.’539

  In The Times, columnist Simon Jenkins called it ‘a ferocious plea by a brave reporter for the world to intervene’ but believed Bell’s conclusion was ‘a tendentious assertion’. Jenkins thought Bell would say he was unbiased but in fact ‘he was biased’, ‘he wanted to blot out thought’. Like Bell, Jenkins had a powerful conclusion:

  Mr Bell claims that intervening is a sign of caring. I disagree. It means in Bosnia asking soldiers to risk their lives and more Bosnian lives, merely to get a particular pile of corpses off the nation’s screen. That is not caring. It is a way of trying not to care.540

  This produced a counter-blast from John Naughton in The Observer, who supported ‘an unforgettable film by Martin Bell’ against Simon Jenkins, ‘an egregious little swot who once edited The Times’.541

  The editor of Panorama, Glenwyn Benson, wrote to The Times to respond to Jenkins’s criticism of Bell and his way of getting the audience’s attention. She said the ‘saturation coverage of diplomatic and military details’ could induce a different kind of bias against understanding: ‘a sense of helplessness and even boredom among the public. Martin Bell’s programme corrected that by reclaiming viewers’ attention so dramatically to the subject. It is a legitimate function of current affairs to enable people to connect via the camera with what is really happening.’542

  This was endorsement indeed for Bell from his masters in London.

  Two decades later at the Frontline Club in London I sat down with Martin Bell to record an interview about impartiality. The years had not diminished his commitment that he was right to have said what he said back in 1993 in Sarajevo in the ruins of the city’s main library.

  Bell: It was a very critical time, it was the first winter of the war, Sarajevo was dying under bombardment, people were starving and I was later accused of crossing the line of calling for intervention. Well, if you actually look at the words, I never did. I said if we intervene, such and such are the consequences and if we don’t, such and such are the consequences and it is a question fundamentally of whether we care. End of script.

  Purvis: You started with a piece to camera that says, ‘Is it time to cut and run or to intervene?’ Those were the opening two options you set out. But I suppose there was a third option which you could characterise as muddling along. But by not including that option, you were in a sense ruling out that option, weren’t you?

  Bell: Because I didn’t think the middle option was tenable. And if you look back, I mean this was a war in a small country in which we know that 98,000 people died and two million were driven from their homes. There was no middle option and it was folly to suppose there was under an inadequate mandate. I proposed what I thought were the two tenable options – either we got on or we got out. I suppose looking back I could have said we carry on as we are. But I’d showed so much of where we were at that particular time, it was obvious from the images that carrying on as we were was not an option.

  Purvis: OK, I think it’s worth quoting the final piece to camera: ‘The case for intervention is not to help one side against the other, but the weak against the strong, the unarmed against the armed, to champion the everyday victims of this war who until today have had no protection. It is fundamentally, a question of whether we care.’ Now I can’t come to any other conclusion than that you support the case for intervention because you seem to be saying that if I don’t support the case for intervention, I don’t care.

  Bell: Yeah, do we care or don’t we? I think that goes up to a line, but it doesn’t cross a line.543

  I also interviewed one of Martin’s BBC colleagues, Michael Buerk, and read him that final piece to camera.

  Buerk: I would want to watch that programme and I wouldn’t want to stop that programme going out. But it placed Martin in a position where he is not simply a reporter, he is an advocate. I have reservations about that anyway, but one of the reservations is that it is very difficult to scramble back into being a dispassionate reporter again.

  I highlighted to Michael Buerk the use of the word ‘care’ in Martin Bell’s last sentence, the implication being that if you care you must agree with intervention. He replied, ‘Yes. That’s verging on the manipulative … It’s you either agree with me or you’re a heartless uncaring person.’

  Martin Bell is still unapologetic, believing that he went ‘up to a line’ but didn’t cross it. He told me, ‘It was a considered analysis deriving from my experience in that war, week in week out, month in month out since the previous April. It was a considered and quite cool analysis – it’s quite coolly delivered as well. No, I’d stand by every word of it – even now.’

  In the early 1990s the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, became a staple diet of British television news as he arrived for and departed from European Union meetings about Bosnia. He was facing increasing criticism in British newspapers over what was seen as his overcautious policy in the Balkans.

  The Foreign Secretary decided on a fightback. He decided to launch it at an event at the Travellers Club in London, one of the oldest gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall. It was founded in 1819 ‘to provide a meeting place for gentlemen who had travelled abroad’ and the original rules included the restriction ‘that no person be considered eligible who shall not have travelled out of the British Islands to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line’.544

  Hurd spoke to the club in private but to make sure his words got a wider audience the Foreign Office faxed his speech to news organisations.

  Hurd told the Travellers Club that journalists had become the founder members of the ‘something-must-be-done school’, pushing for military intervention in Bosnia. ‘We have not been, and are not, willing to begin some form of military intervention which we judge useless or worse, simply because of day-to-day pressures from the media.’545

  In the text that was sent out in advance Hurd named the offenders: ‘Most of those who report for the BBC, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, have been in different ways enthusiasts for pushing military intervention in Bosnia, whether by air or on the ground.’ But according to one media commentator, when Hurd actually made the speech, ‘years of diplomatic training got the better of him and he left out the names of the guilty parties’.546

  It didn’t matter. Everyone who needed to know did know who he was talking about. A week later BBC correspondent John Simpson gave a lecture, Making News, to the Royal Television Society, in which he put the name of Martin Bell into the public debate. He recalled the Panorama film on Bosnia, which he said was ‘quite intentionally a personal view’. Simpson went on, ‘He indeed wanted something done. It was clearly labelled as his private opinion. The rest of his reporting, as with every other BBC correspondent who has been there, had been perfectly objective.’547

  The next month Bell himself replied to Mr Hurd with customary gusto. ‘We have been described by Mr Hurd as founder members of the “something-must-be-done school”. Surrounded by so much misery and destruction, it is humanly difficult to be anything else, but to want to see an end to it.’

  Bell said the journalists were certainly not out to ‘get the government’. But he couldn’t resist tweaking the Foreign Secretary’s tail about British policy in Bosnia:

  I understand very well that the government, under many pressures, including those generated by television, is probably doing as
much as it can: Britain has, after all, the largest of all the UN contingents now in Bosnia: or to put it another way, as little as it can get away with.548

  Martin Bell’s comments appeared to have no impact on Douglas Hurd’s policy. More than a year later, in December 1994, the Foreign Secretary was still arguing in an article in The Independent that negotiation was still a better option in Bosnia than escalation of the war or a withdrawal by the West. Britain could, at least, still help save civilian lives. ‘Something must be done is not a policy. I do not meet many people who want the British Army to go to war in the Balkans. There is no just outcome that we can be sure of achieving.’549

  Yet within a year the British Army, with its allies, had gone to war in the Balkans. It turned out to be a very short war that achieved quite a lot.

  While the Bosnia debate had raged in the policy salons of London, back on the streets of Sarajevo the killing had carried on. UNPROFOR did its best but mostly stood by and watched, and sometimes, as in the case of the Serb massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995, even vacated a so-called ‘safe zone’ to the killers and their ‘ethnic cleansing’. It was the worst massacre of the war and this seemed like a turning point. NATO finally bombed the Serb positions around Sarajevo, which allowed the Muslim and Croat troops to advance. The Serbs agreed to talks and by the end of the year all sides had signed the Dayton peace accord. Martin Bell would have been entitled to say ‘I told you so two years ago.’

  Attachment and impartiality

  Instead he sat down ‘to reflect more than usual on the life that I have lived’. The Bosnian war had ‘mattered to me more than anything else I have lived through, and still does’. The result was a book, In Harm’s Way, published in October 1995. Inevitably Bell’s story from Bosnia took up most of the book but at the end of a paragraph on page 128 there was a brief but wider passing thought. ‘In the news business it isn’t involvement but indifference that makes for bad practice. Good journalism is the journalism of attachment. It is not only knowing, but also caring.’550

  The term was never used again in the book and was never explained beyond that single sentence about knowing and caring. Yet deciding what exactly the journalism of attachment was and whether you were in favour of it or against it became a continuing thread in journalistic debate in Britain for many years. The lighting of the fuse for the debate came a year after the book’s publication at Newsworld ’96, a conference in Berlin attended by 500 international broadcasters. By now Bell had tendered his resignation to the BBC because he felt sidelined after leaving Bosnia. He planned to leave the corporation two months later.

  As he spoke, I was sitting near the front of the hall taking notes. As the editor-in-chief of the BBC’s rival, ITN, I was concerned by the attacks Martin Bell was making on the integrity of some of my reporters. I feared that this would become the major talking point of the conference. I needn’t have worried. A bigger story was about to break.

  Martin Bell turned his guns on what he called ‘bystanders’ journalism’ which concerned itself ‘more with the circumstances of war than with the people’. He did not believe reporters ‘should stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, aggressor and victim’.

  Bell once wrote, ‘Let me declare an interest; all the reporters who work regularly on the Bosnian beat are, at least privately, interventionist.’551

  For some newspaper correspondents there was no problem in abandoning neutrality and making their private view public. That was what some of them were paid to do.

  But these were broadcasters gathered in the conference hall in Berlin and the British ones were, like many of their international counterparts, required by law to remain ‘impartial’.

  When the session was opened up to questions from the floor, a young man to my left got up and identified himself as Lucian Hudson, a senior editor on the BBC’s international 24-hour television channel, BBC World.

  He attacked the ‘journalism of attachment’ as ‘very risky’. Martin Bell sounded to him ‘like a celibate priest who at a certain stage in his life has decided to go and bonk. The temptation to get engaged is just too great and he wants to get stuck in.’552

  Bell responded, ‘Now you know why I prefer to work in war zones rather than the BBC. In war zones I only have to watch my front.’ He later wrote of the incident that he had been ‘set upon from the floor by a middle-ranking BBC executive who clearly saw me as a heretic and backslider from long-established truths. He compared me to a priest who had grown weary of the long years of celibacy and had resolved to explore the carnal pleasures hitherto denied.’553 Despite his views on middle-ranking BBC executives, a month later Bell withdrew his resignation when a new roving reporting role for him was agreed.

  Bell’s colleagues on the BBC’s reporting front line were slow to come forward in support of ‘the journalism of attachment’. Partly, one suspects, they weren’t clear what exactly the journalism was attached to. Was it to one side or another, or was it simply to caring? As one media commentator, John Lloyd, later put it, ‘To what do reporters decide to be attached?’ 554

  Bell’s concept even earned a place in a history of propaganda by the media academic Professor Philip Taylor. He interpreted Bell as ‘effectively arguing for the media actively to serve a propagandist role: propaganda for peace’.555 The ‘journalism of attachment’ certainly sounded like a journalism of advocacy. More like counsel for the prosecution or the defence rather than the court reporter or a judge’s even-handed summing up.

  John Simpson of the BBC, who had defended Bell over Douglas Hurd’s attack, said that ‘Martin Bell is talking nonsense and he knows it’.556

  A former BBC correspondent, Robert Fox, later said, ‘I am at deep difference with my colleague and friend, Martin Bell, because he coined the phrase “journalism of attachment”.’557

  In 2011 I asked former BBC foreign correspondent Michael Buerk what he thought the term meant: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve never had the faintest idea about Martin and his journalism of attachment.’558

  Martin Bell’s most considered views on his craft came in a 1997 ‘FOOC’ – an eight-minute audio essay for From Our Own Correspondent. He called it ‘The Truth Is Our Currency’.

  With hindsight, what is most striking about the essay is that Bell rejected some ethical concepts but then went on to embrace others which sounded very similar. He began:

  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 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.

  It appeared that he rejected objectivity. ‘Objective? I’m 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 stored experience, which is surely the very essence of the subjective.’

  So he rejected objectivity but then he appeared to go on to embrace impartiality: ‘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 spokesmen of unfavoured causes.’

  And just to be certain he reminded the listener of the BBC’s statutory commitment to impartiality: ‘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.’559

  So Bell believed he was definitely impartial but deliberately not objective. It was to be many years before anybody offered a clear way through this definitional maze.

  In 2007, an 81-page report on impartiality produced for the BBC Trust said, ‘Fortunately this report is not required to provide an elaborate definition.’ Impartiality was ‘an elusive, almost magical substance, which is often more evident in its absence than in its presence’.560

  For a time the BBC College of Journalism websit
e included a video, ‘Introducing Impartiality’, in which Evan Davis introduced a new concept called ‘Impartiality with Attitude’ in which reporters could demonstrate ‘attitude’ while remaining impartial. By 2012 the video no longer appeared on the site.561

  The site did say in 2012 that ‘impartiality is not the same as objectivity or balance or neutrality, although it contains elements of all three.’ But the differences and similarities were not explained.562

  Kevin Marsh, the former editor of one of the BBC’s flagship programmes, Today, has cited examples of ‘how the BBC’s defining value of impartiality had, by the turn of this century, become so complex and differentially understood that even the BBC’s governors didn’t quite understand it and found it difficult to apply in practice’.563

  It was Richard Sambrook who, as head of BBC Newsgathering, had been one of Bell’s editors through the turbulent years in Bosnia, and who tried to bring some light to these confused proceedings. Sambrook had gone on to become the director of BBC News during what became known as ‘Hutton’ (see Chapter 13) and by 2012 was director of the Centre for Journalism at Cardiff University. He wrote a paper on impartiality and objectivity in the digital age in which he explained that ‘impartiality’ and ‘objectivity’ are used interchangeably, ‘although they mean different things and are used differently in the US from the UK’.564

  Sambrook offered two short-form definitions: impartiality was ‘the removal of bias’ whereas objectivity was ‘a disciplined approach to isolate evidence and facts’. On that basis he politely concluded that ‘there seems to be confusion’ in Bell’s conviction that he no longer believed in objectivity. In fact, rather than be against objectivity, ‘the identification of facts and evidence seems to be exactly what Martin Bell supports’.

  The former news editor, helping to clear up what one of his reporters really meant to say fifteen years earlier, then turned his attention to Bell’s views on ‘impartiality’. In his ‘FOOC’ Bell had said he was in favour of it. But Sambrook argued that in reality Bell was concerned about it because the absence of bias or opinion about facts ‘produces a value-free moral equivalence between good and evil’. He quoted Bell’s own reporting of a massacre in Bosnia which, he said, was ‘a model of how to avoid moral equivalence in journalism that was still framed by objectivity and impartiality’. Bell had reported: