Last Tuesday I was lucky enough to attend a short lecture given by Martin Bell. That’s the Martin Bell who once graced our screens on the evening news reporting from war zones like Bosnia and the same Martin Bell who defeated Neil Hamilton and became the first independent MP since 1951.
Mr Bell’s speech was built around the death of news. The withdrawal of journalists from the real world. He was particularly scathing of what he termed “rooftop journalism”. Referring to the coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Mr Bell said: “They (the journalists) don’t know what’s going on.”
Mr Bell spoke of his own experiences as a journalist working in war zones. His advice was that to truly understand the situation you needed to cover the conflict from amongst the people. Get amongst the action and meet with the key players of the conflict. And yes, that meant the “bad” guys as well as the “good” guys. Something that I feel current Western governments would disapprove of given their desire to control the media.
Obviously there’s a risk in this for the journalist and for those around them. But the alternative is a journalistic world where the news stories are drip fed to the journalists and those stories are decided on by the military and our governments. We might as well not have any journalists in war zones if all they do is cover just one side of the conflict, repeating the government line to the masses.
Perhaps the rise of citizen journalists, through the medium of Blogging, is the only answer to the current situation we find ourselves in. Real people, on the ground in a conflict zone, are the witnesses to real events. Although not trained, or backed by global news organs, they may be the nearest we can get to the old ideal of the war correspondent.
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