An event at the Frontline Club on 25 September saw a discussion focused on the recently published book by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, When Reporters Cross The Line, examining the ethics of reporting in high pressure situations.

L-R Frederick Forsyth, Jeff Hulbert, Martin Bell, Stewart Purvis, Penny Marshall. Photo: Greta Hofmann

Assembled for the discussion were Purvis, professor of television journalism at City University, Hulbert, a media historian, Penny Marshall of ITV News, former journalist and renowned novelist Frederick Forsyth and veteran journalist Martin Bell in the chair.

A wide-ranging talk took in Marshall’s defence of a story on Bosnian war atrocities, Forsyth’s experiences of reporting the Biafra massacres in Nigeria, and a variety of other issues associated with reporting under pressure.

The product of meticulous archive research, Purvis and Hulbert’s book covers a range of situations in which lines might be crossed.

“No one has ever defined what the line is,” said Purvis. “We found that there are lots of lines.”

“We felt that there was a need for certainty in regulations, but found that regulatory precision is unlikely and that there are grey areas all over the place. . . . The subtitle for the book was heroes, villains, hackers and spies. Some of the villains turned out to be heroes and some of the heroes turned out to be villains.”

Touching on the issue of protection of a journalist’s sources, Hulbert suggested that while this is important, there was also a responsibility for a journalist to be held accountable for their reporting:

“It’s a little debatable from the archives whether the stories actually held water. . . . At no point have lawyers said to journalists ‘you made it up mate’. They just allowed the innuendo to percolate.”

In 2000, ITN won a libel case against left-wing magazine Living Marxism that had claimed that Marshall, along with others at ITN, had fabricated a report about a Bosnian detention camp.

“The supposed motives were variously that we were in it to win it, were vain, wanted an award, or worse had an anti-Serb agenda and had gone out to see what we wanted to see and wasn’t there,” she explained. “What ensued some of the bravest defending of our journalism.”

Marshall admitted though that in the heat of a situation the lines are not always clear cut:

“In the field the lines are blurred,” she said. “It’s easy for regulators and for academics who are not in high stress situations. But in these situations you have to rely on the seasoned judgement of journalists. I held hands with a lost child. I showed I cared . . . we’re not robots. If you don’t care, don’t be a journalist.”

A more difficult line, said Marshall, was the extent to which sources of stories should be put at risk:

“I’ve always worried that some of the people who were in our report lost their lives because of our endeavours to show what was happening.”

Forsyth said that he had crossed “three lines” during the course of his career. The first was taking a job as the BBC’s assistant diplomatic correspondent at the age of 28 and realising he had not only “inadvertently joined the establishment”, but was also “expected to serve it”.

The coverage he was expected to produce of the Nigerian-Biafran war in 1967, he said, was “strongly biased”. The second line was his decision to walk out on his post without notice and board a plane to Biafra, where he witnessed what he described as “a deliberately concocted and organised famine.”

“It was the only time our government has assisted a foreign government killing its own citizens,” he said. “Why? Because of the massive vanity of senior civil servants who could not and would not be proved wrong.”

Others on the panel agreed that journalists are often under the pressure of editorial agendas.

“I’ve become more sceptical about impartiality,” said Purvis. “You have to ask whether the coverage of Libya [of the overthrow of the country’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, in 2011] was really balanced. And yet the only channel that was criticised for bias was Russia Today, and that was for being pro-Gaddafi.”

Forsyth agreed:

“I don’t think there’s any major story where you can avoid bias. There’s almost always two sides to every story. The establishment is not the friend of dispassionate reporting because it wants its version to dominate and that may well be the wrong version.”

The issue of celebrity among broadcast journalists was also a source of concern.

“There are a number of celebrity journalists who have thrived through their celebrity,” says Hulbert. “Some I imagine would be able to gain entry to worlds that mere mortals such as I wouldn’t, so I think it helps. But whether it’s that celebrity emerges from the quality of your work or whether it emerges from a desire to be a celebrity depends on the individual.”

Marshall argued that one advantage of broadcast journalism is that many potential elements of bias are plain for all to see:

“You can see who I am and what I am. . . . You wear your history on your face, but I don’t think you can leave it behind.”

But the confines of the mainstream news agenda remain an issue, Marshall continued:

“The agenda is so narrow now which I regret. My children’s agenda is much wider than the news we’re feeding them. It’s part of a bigger disconnect between Westminster and the public and the media and the public.

The space for independent journalism, meanwhile, is shrinking. As Michela Wrong, a former Financial Times and Reuters journalist commented from the floor:

“It’s about how you see the world. If you go to an Angolan diamond mine with a diamond company, or with Oxfam, or on your own, you’re going to have three completely different experiences. There’s not really any room for independent journalists to cover a story now.”

In the end, says Marshall, it is down to the journalist to hold themselves accountable for their stories, and to be transparent about any lines they may have crossed.

“You want the sort of journalists who cross lines because the best journalists have the will to bring Biafra to account. But they also need to know that when they cross lines they can admit to doing it and are prepared to explain themselves.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/when-reporters-cross-the-line

On Friday 20 September, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of David Evans’ Pretty Village, which was followed by an emotional debate and panel discussion featuring protagonist and producer Kemal Pervanic and journalist at ITV News, Penny Marshall. The debate was moderated by Ed Vulliamy, writer for The Guardian and The Observer.

L-R: Ed Vuilliamy, Kemal Pervanic, Penny Marshall, David Evans. Photo: Doug Brown

The film is centred on the Bosnian village of Kevljani and follows author and youth worker Kemal Pervanic as he, amongst other things, revisits the site of his internment in the nearby Omarska detention camp, confronts a former teacher who sanctioned his torture and runs a reconciliation camp for the area’s youth.

The Muslim village in the north of Bosnia is surrounded by ethnically Serbian communities and as such was directly affected during the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Using archival footage along with personal testimonies from the surviving villagers, Evans manages to give a good sense of what pre-war life in the mixed Croat, Bosnian and Serb neighbourhoods was like; a place where Pervanic remembers that his “childhood was really beautiful”. This is an idea that the still visible destruction makes hard to imagine, especially when coupled with horrific accounts of torture, beatings, humiliation and deportation by former neighbours – the men who became the guards, torturers and perpetrators of many of the associated crimes against the six thousand strong Muslim community.

During the panel discussion following the screening, Vulliamy asked Evans why he made the film, to which he replied:

“The reconstruction from the war seems very very slow and there are lots of unresolved issues. . . . Just sitting in people’s houses and listening to people talk in ways I have never really heard people talk about war and how it affected them . . . for me, I just wanted to hear their voices and have the opportunity to tell their story, and its been a very moving experience for me, to have the privilege to be in these people’s homes, and hear them talk about these things. No one listens to their story; they have no one to tell their story to.”

This inability to talk about what happened during the war was a central theme throughout the discussion, with Pervanic stating that:

“This was so personal . . . what happened was so big that the perhaps the Serbs cannot recognise what they did. There is a lot of denial in our community”.

Left: director David Evans and journalist Ed Vulliamy Right: journalist Penny Marchall and protagonist Kemal Pervanic

When asked who else would want to see this film Pervanic replied:

“It’s a human story, it’s not just about a small village in Bosnia…I want everyone to see it. We must know our past. Without it we are nothing, we learn nothing.”

The audience – which included a number of Omarska camp survivors – was asked by Evans for their feedback, and while the loud applause suggested it was well received, the political tensions and divisions that the Balkan states are infamous for quickly rose to the surface. A number of questions focused on why the film didn’t cover how or why the war happened, or give a more balanced perspective – including more Serbian views – to which Evans repeated that he was not “interested in making  political statements or a  piece of journalism. . . it was never my intention to make a film about war in Yugoslavia”.

Despite all that Pervanic has experienced, his sober response to a somewhat antagonistic pro-Serb question provided a calming closing statement to the night:

“Generals don’t suffer, politicians don’t suffer; it’s people like me who suffer. . . . I don’t want to blame, that is not the point of the film”

More information can be found on the film’s website, and you can view the trailer of Pretty Village here:

The international editor for ITV News, Bill Neely delivered a fascinating masterclass in television journalism last night at the Frontline Club.

Part of a regular series of ‘Reflections’ events in association with the BBC College of Journalism, in which top journalists talk about their work and those who inspired them, the hour-and-half event was a mine of information and expert analysis on how to best make use of words, pictures and sound – and silence.

A must-watch for aspiring journalists and those who want to improve their game, the event includes insight into some of the key moments in TV journalism history since the 1980s, including the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995. In the face of the atrocities carried out during that conflict, some journalists including the BBC correspondent Martin Bell and Ed Vulliamy decided that detachment was no longer possible and instead opted for the “journalism of attachment”, Neely explained.

He also analysed his colleague Penny Marshall’s use of words and pictures in a 1992 report from a Serb-run detention camp in Bosnia, which opens with Marshall saying ‘We were not prepared for what we saw there’. “Then for 18 seconds, she said nothing,” said Neely.

The report won the International News Award for 1992 at the Royal Television Society TV Journalism Awards but was caught up in a “storm” after Living Marxism magazine claimed that the video tapes were faked.

ITN successfully sued the magazine for libel but some people “still had not forgiven” BBC world affairs editor John Simpson’s decision to give evidence for the magazine, Neely said.

After showing one of his earlier reports from Newry while he was the BBC’s Northern Ireland correspondent, Neely examined the work of a number of journalists from ITV News, including Colin Baker and Paul Davis and the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and Martin Bell.

Good journalists are able to use words to “grab a person by the lapels and never let them go,” said Neely,  who talked about the different approaches used by journalists, including Bell, who did not script his reports.

Drawing on a career that had seen him cover stories around the world from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Haiti earthquake and fighting in Libya, Neely also discussed the use of sound, pointing out the differences in the way  ITV News and the BBC reported from Dunblane massacre in March 1996.

Neely highlighted Baker’s report that showed school children leaving the primary school where 16 of their classmates and a teacher were shot dead. Ove the images, the former senior correspondent said: “Evil touched them, but just brushed past.”

During the report the sound of grieving parents could be heard from a building behind him but at no point did Baker draw attention to it, Neely said. “I think there are times when you just don’t need to,” he added.

The award-winning journalist, who picked up BAFTA’s three years in a row, contrasted different reporting styles from the BBC correspondent Kate Adie’s “icily detached” approach to the more conversational style of his colleague Tom Bradby, political editor of ITV News.

Neely talked the audience through step by step through his report from Haiti that won him his most recent BAFTA  last year. The report was shown in three parts and Neely highlighted different aspects of the package, which Ray pointed out broke with accepted wisdom of “using your best pictures first”.

Part two of the interview is here: