And Thank You For Watching

by Mark Austin

  Now, there was no legal obligation for any of the news organizations he supplied to help his family financially or in any other way. But what sort of trade is it that treats its own like that? Things have to change.

  Most obviously, there should be a recognized insurance policy for freelancers, and news organizations and agencies should contribute to the cost while the freelancer is providing for them. It really is a small price to pay.

  We tend to think that most journalists who are killed are caught in the crossfire, or just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some are, it is true, and their deaths are no less regrettable for that. But the horrific truth is that more than 70 per cent of the journalists killed in the last two decades were murdered in cold blood. And here is the scandalous statistic: in 80 per cent of those cases – yes, 80 per cent − the killers were not brought to justice.

  So what we have are police and security forces who do not take the murders of journalists seriously – or worse, who are complicit in those murders themselves. It is nothing less than state-sanctioned killing and it is an outrage.

  We journalists − all of us − share a belief that news and the spread of information is the foundation of democracy. We share a belief that good journalism should call bad governments to account. We share a belief that good journalism is about exposing abuse of power, corruption and malpractice, and not letting it go unmonitored and unchecked, unknown, unpublicized and untold. We share all these beliefs about our trade. But increasingly, such journalism and such beliefs come at a very high price; and, let’s be honest, very few of us are prepared to pay it… and why should we have to?

  When journalists are deliberately targeted and killed, it is a crime. When it happens during a conflict, it is a war crime. It is as simple as that, and governments and regimes around the world need to recognize it. Because at the moment it is difficult to be optimistic. If bad people in bad regimes see journalists can be killed with impunity, what hope is there?

  It happened to my great friend and colleague Mick Deane, a lovable bear of a man and a top-quality cameraman who guided me around the world’s trouble spots in my early years as a foreign correspondent. He was shot and killed by what was assumed to be an Egyptian military sniper in 2013. He was filming with his team from Sky News outside the Rabaa mosque in eastern Cairo, where Egyptian security forces had just massacred hundreds of protestors. He was almost certainly deliberately killed.

  As his wife, Daniela, wrote afterwards: ‘Mick was an easy target… He was big and blond in a sea of protesters, hauling a bulky television camera. I think the security forces just got tired of seeing him there. So they decided to kill him. Not that I’ll ever know for sure. They’ve never admitted it, of course.’

  Three Egyptian journalists, including a twenty-six-year-old woman, were also killed that day. The security forces probably didn’t want the story of the massacre to be told. So they shot and killed journalists. They murdered Mick. Yes, it was murder, of course it was, even though the coroner did not have the evidence to call it that. It was a murder carried out with total impunity. And that is a disgrace. But that is what happens when bad regimes do bad things they do not want publicized.

  Before working with me, Mick had partnered another friend of mine, the foreign correspondent turned Sky News anchor Jeremy Thompson, and they became very close. After Mick’s death, Thompson wrote: ‘Mick Deane died as he lived, doing his best. Doing his best to open the eyes of the world to injustice.’

  Mick was all of those things and more. He had great wisdom too, and experience. When I was a young Asia correspondent, he really was my guiding hand. He knew when to go on a story and when not to go. He would know which airline to fly, where to stay, who to talk to, who to trust and who to ignore. He would know drivers, local fixers and who you could rely on. He also knew how to enjoy himself. Boy, did he know how to do that.

  I spoke at his memorial service and said: ‘He was an “everything will be fine” man, and when you’re an insecure, uncertain novice trying to make your way in this game, he was utterly indispensable.’

  But Mick also knew the dangers of places like Egypt. He knew journalists are targets in many places around this world. He knew the risks. So much so that, at sixty-one, he was about to retire to the lakeside home in Italy he had built with Daniela. My heart aches for her. I really miss him.

  Reporting has never been a safe profession, but what’s changed is that nowadays journalists are regarded as targets, as fair game, as an extension of Western governments. Correspondents and aid workers are slaughtered on camera by barbaric Islamic State fighters who see the reporters as no different from enemy soldiers. It is a perilous job; more perilous than ever before.

  And one reason is that modern technology in TV news allows us to broadcast, live if we choose to, closer to conflict zones than ever before. In the world of 24/7 breaking news, it is all about being live as it happens, at the scene, up to the minute. Exciting, breathless and edgy reporting from the front line as the bullets and the rocket-propelled grenades fly. Get that sound. Get that picture. Get it all. Because if we don’t, the opposition will.

  But wait, stop a moment, let’s pause and think. Just because you can, doesn’t always mean you should. Covering any conflict is dangerous, but as we’ve witnessed recently, covering conflicts and uprisings can be particularly difficult when there are no clear front lines and certainly no rules. The bravery of many journalists goes without saying, but it is perhaps important that the expectations placed upon them, or which they place upon themselves, do not expose them to an unnecessary level of danger.

  And I see other reasons to worry. Rigorous cost-cutting within the media means there are fewer overseas-based correspondents who build up real experience on their patch. Instead, there is an increasing tendency to use so-called parachute correspondents, who are less able to assess dangerous situations in conflict-affected areas. I know, because I was one for several years. They do not have the same connections or contacts or knowledge, and will be more inclined to make errors of judgement. These are serious issues.

  For me, the great sadness of television news at the moment is that just as we reach a golden age in terms of technology, allowing news to be delivered much more quickly and in so many different ways, the budgets for covering news are contracting.

  I can see a future with less and less foreign reporting, proper journalism, eyewitness reporting across the world. Getting into where the story is, establishing for yourself what is going on and producing original pictures and script to inform the viewer.

  Blank-canvas journalism is being there, finding out and discovering, and reporting what you find. No bias, no slant, no preconceptions, no agenda, no prejudice. It is pure journalism – the hardest sort of journalism, because often it is in parts of the world that are difficult, expensive and dangerous to reach.

  It is the kind of journalism practised by the John Simpsons, John Irvines, Bill Neelys, Lyse Doucets, Lindsay Hilsums, Jeremy Bowens and Alex Crawfords of this world. They are among the great exponents of blank-canvas journalism still on our screens. But for how long?

  The balance of power is already shifting towards the news presenter as a personality. It is sometimes almost as if the person delivering the news is more important than the news itself. Some clearly think they are. The best news anchors are journalists first and celebrities second, if at all.

  It really is ironic that it is so much easier to get your journalism out there, and yet smaller budgets mean there is less journalism being done. And if broadcast news is facing unprecedented challenges, then technological changes and cost-cutting are leaving many newspapers staring at extinction.

  More than 170 local titles have closed in the UK in the last ten years, as readership is eroded by other sources of news and local media groups face declining advertising revenue and sales. It is immensely sad. The local newspaper where I began my career, the Bournemouth Echo (as it is now known), still survives, but in a radic
ally altered environment – and for how long?

  Local newspapers are an essential part of the journalistic food chain, with reporters in local communities playing a crucial role. They not only allow communities to know what is going on locally, but they also offer real democratic value. The presence of a journalist at a local council meeting, for example, makes local politicians more accountable and keeps tab on their behaviour.

  And the same is happening to local newspapers in the United States. David Simon, the creator of the crime series The Wire and a former reporter on the Baltimore Sun, put his fears very clearly: ‘The next ten or fifteen years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician. I really envy them.’

  His point, of course, being that as the number of journalists scrutinizing a politician’s every move declines, so the opportunity to misbehave increases.

  The British satirist on US TV, John Oliver, was even more colourful: ‘Not having reporters at government meetings is like a teacher leaving her room of seventh graders to supervise themselves. Best-case scenario, Britney gets gum in her hair. Worst-case scenario, you no longer have a school.’

  Many newspapers are slowly moving to an online presence to try to make money. But as Oliver points out, there’s the danger of ‘the temptation to graduate to what gets the most clicks. News organizations badly need to have leaders who appreciate that what’s popular is not always what’s most important.’ Precisely.

  The fact is, as I argued earlier, people are going to have to get used to paying for reliable news. Or, as John Oliver says, ‘we are all going to pay for it.’

  In his book, We Chose to Speak of War and Strife, the BBC’s estimable John Simpson mourns the passing of the era of the great foreign correspondent. He writes about the Daily Express newspaper, which for around fifty years boasted one of the world’s great stables of foreign correspondents: ‘As late as 1968 thirty-five correspondents were still based around the world for the Express… By the early nineties the Express had one.’

  His name was John Ellison; and eventually, says Simpson, ‘he had to go too’. Just before Ellison left the Express, they met by chance at Heathrow Terminal 4, both on their way to different stories somewhere in the world. They spoke briefly and then went their separate ways. Simpson writes: ‘I remember thinking I was saying goodbye to the last old-style foreign correspondent… shrewd, literate, good at languages, stylish, distinctly steely beneath the civilised exterior.’

  So, given all of the above, do I feel pessimistic about the future of journalism? In some ways I do; it is pretty clear that the era of the foreign correspondent, blessed with the resources, support and, above all, time to do the job, is coming to an end. They are increasingly seen as an expensive luxury, and the contracting budgets of the major networks in America and the UK, and of the world’s leading newspapers, mean they are being faded out fast.

  Now, that is bad for journalists, for consumers, for accountability and for democracy. But on the other hand, there is no better time to be a journalist. This is in so many ways a golden age: there is more news, it travels more quickly and in so many different forms. It is analysed more quickly and delivered more quickly. While consumption of TV news is in slow decline, people are consuming news online in increasing numbers. It is not unusual for original, dramatic and interesting content to get millions of hits.

  So journalism has to adapt to the new world, and part of that involves finding a way to get people to pay for it. This is the big challenge of our time for journalism. The BBC licencefee model and the advertising model on commercial TV still sustain. But not for long. If a way can be found to more lucratively monetize online news, then I think the future is bright.

  But, most important of all, the news needs to be right or it’s dead. The truth matters. Now, perhaps, more than ever. Because, as I’ve observed across the pond over the past twelve months, the truth is under siege.

  AND FINALLY. . . FROM TRUMPTOWN

  AT 7.19 A.M. on Saturday, 6 January 2018, the phone by my bedside sounded an alert. Donald Trump had sent out the first of three tweets that, even by his standards, beggared belief.

  He had decided to address a question that was fast surfacing in Washington: his mental fitness for office. Just a year into his presidency, and this is what it had come to. This is what he said: ‘Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart… I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star, to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius… and a very stable genius at that!’

  I honestly thought his Twitter account had been hacked. But no, it really was Trump. He was reacting to the publication of a book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. In it, Wolff claims that many of those close to the president, including his former chief strategist Steve Bannon, were openly questioning his fitness for office.

  It is a wholly unflattering tome that depicts the president as a childlike, ignorant, unread, impulsive, self-obsessed, fast-food-devouring egomaniac. It was described as ‘sensational’, ‘shocking’ and even as ‘the book that will bring down the president’. It was actually no such thing. Trump would have done better to ignore it.

  But, most significantly, it did bring talk about the president’s mental stability and fitness for office out into the open. Suddenly, it became part of the accepted discourse of the mainstream media.

  Previously, it was only his Twitter enemies and his more extreme political opponents who were talking about the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, the constitutional provision by which the Cabinet and then Congress can vote to remove the president if he’s deemed to be incapable of doing his job.

  Up until this point, a group of Democrats in Congress had introduced legislation to force the president to submit to psychological evaluation, and a number of mental health professionals signed a petition calling for his removal from office after one of them wrote a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists Assess a President. But that was about it. It could all have been easily dismissed as armchair diagnosis and politically motivated character assassination.

  With the publication of Wolff’s book, that seemed to change. And it changed in large part because of Donald Trump himself. By engaging with the issue in his tweets on that Saturday morning, he risked, in a way, giving substance – even credibility – to the charge. Or, at the very least, he was giving the story ‘legs’, as we say in journalism.

  He was guaranteeing that his fitness for office was the story of the next few days, and I remember thinking to myself that a ‘very stable genius’ would probably not have done that. There can be no upside for a president when the story is his own mental capacity to serve.

  Questions about presidential mental health are nothing new. Abraham Lincoln was diagnosed with depression; John F. Kennedy took prescription drugs for anxiety; Lyndon B. Johnson was investigated for paranoid disintegration. But in all these cases, the details remained shrouded in secrecy for many years.

  With Trump, it is not only in the public domain, but he encouraged it to be so with his bizarre tweets. Where was the benefit for him in doing this? What was the strategy? I simply couldn’t understand it.

  The criticism in the book, whether accurate, semi-accurate or plain untrue, obviously hit a nerve – and, Trump being Trump, he couldn’t help himself. He had to lash out. It’s who he is and what he instinctively does. Indeed, he went further and asked the White House doctor to undertake cognitive testing during what was supposed to be a purely physical health check.

  The doctor, Dr Ronny Jackson, subsequently held a very odd press conference in which the very first questions from the media were about Donald Trump’s mental fitness for office. He reassured everybody that there was no cause for concern. But, once again, Trump had ensured that t
he question of his mental acuity was right up there at the top of the media agenda. It was utterly bizarre.

  In any case, the talk about invoking the 25th Amendment is way off the mark. It would require something far more serious than currently exists to provoke such a move. It is really designed to deal with cases where the president is so out of it that he is in no shape whatsoever to even agree to hand over authority. Whatever Trump’s detractors may wish for, we are, as I write at least, a million miles from that. It is highly unlikely to happen.

  The amendment was introduced in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the debilitating illnesses suffered by Dwight Eisenhower. It would need a crisis on that level to be enacted. And, politically, it is very difficult to see it happening. Before Congress even gets to vote on it, the vice president (personally selected by Trump) would have to call a vote of the Cabinet (personally selected by Trump), and a majority would have to agree he was no longer fit or able to be president. Only then would Congress assemble, and two-thirds of both the House and Senate would have to vote to remove the president.

  It is such a high bar that it can virtually be ruled out. Trump should have ignored the whole issue about his fitness to serve, just as he should have ignored the Wolff book. But his tactic in response to the book was to write it off as ‘fake news’ and as part of the broader media conspiracy to undermine the presidency: ‘Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book…’ he tweeted. He also threatened the publishers with legal action and injunctions.

  By now, Trump’s war with the media was reaching an alarming intensity. His ‘fake news’ taunts became unrelenting and unedifying. To be fair to Trump, his hostility to the media does have its roots in a genuine grievance. By and large, they cut him no slack whatsoever. The television mainstream media, in particular, has become tribal in its criticism. He can do no right.