Martin Bell, a war correspondent whose fame was cemented by his BBC reports from Sarajevo during the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital, is one of journalism’s anti-celebrity celebrities. He was elected to a seat in the British parliament in 1997, and draws on his experience as a war reporter to attack what he believes is a lack of moral fibre in the political and media classes. In this endeavour he is the main proponent of a principle known as the “journalism of attachment”, which he defined in a recent interview for Prospect magazine in the negative: “It’s not polemical. John Pilger [the journalist who believes US imperialism is the greatest danger in the world] is too polemical for me. What I mean is a journalism which cares as well as knows.”
The South African conflict journalists covered in this month’s lead story may not necessarily subscribe to Bell’s brand of advocacy journalism – one wouldn’t want to slap a category on them without their consent – but it’s plain that they all “care” and “know”. Journalist Milton Nkosi, producer Cecile Antonie and cameraman Ian Robbie learned a special kind of empathy during the township violence of the ’80s and ’90s; they developed a sensitivity that enabled them to report on the suffering at the heart of a hostile crowd, and return in safety. Between them, they’ve taken this understanding to conflicts in Afghanistan, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Iraq and many others for the world’s major news networks.
Lead story writer Hamilton Wende, who himself has covered 15 wars and conflicts around the world, opens the piece with a personal anecdote about a narrow brush with death while reporting on a mass funeral in Evaton in 1984. It’s the sort of experience that must have a profound effect on a journalist – in Bell’s case an incoming mortar in Sarajevo knocked the “detachment” out of him – and its telling lends a sobering perspective to what this industry actually does (or can do).
Wende’s sidebar to the main piece points out that of the 347 journalists killed in the last decade, only 16% died in crossfire – the rest were murdered in retaliation for their reports. According to the statistics, Algeria has been the most dangerous country for journalists in that time, and Paula Slier’s piece gives an indication of why that is. But Tim Spira reminds us that even the United States abuses journalists: of the four Iraqis subjected to torture and various other humiliations by American troops in Fallujah recently, three worked for Reuters and one for NBC.
How detached can you be about that?