Some years ago I attended a conference outside London run by a Buddhist organization who wanted to know why the Western media had dozens of war correspondents on their staffs but not a single peace correspondent. It was a simple, fair and important question and although we argued about it for hours no satisfactory answer emerged. As far as I know the Buddhists are still looking.
They will be greatly helped by a new academic study published in “Media, War and Conflict” (Sagepublications.com) which draws on a six country study of viewers of CNN International, BBC World and Al-Jazeera English to see whether broadcasters foster cross-cultural understanding or a clash of civilizations. War or peace?
The study was carried out by Shawn Powers of the University of Southern California, and Mohammed el-Nawawy, of Queens University of Charlotte, NC, USA.
They are not impressed with the job that war correspondents have been doing. “Media coverage of contemporary conflict has been dominated by a style of ‘war journalism’ that is more likely to further international tensions between global publics,” they write.
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These are the homepages of distinguished journalist and author Phillip Knightley. An Australian by birth, Phillip became part of the celebrated Sunday Times Insight team from the 1950s to the 1970s, breaking such famous stories as the Kim Philby spy scandal, the Profumo sex scandal and exposing the effects of thalidomide on new-born babies.
Now an acknowledged expert in the dark arts of warfare, having written the seminal text of wartime propaganda First Casualty, he lives in London and works as a freelance journalist for publications all over the world. He is the author of some 10 books, covering in depth some of the biggest stories of recent times. Most recently he has written his autobiography A Hack’s Progress and the critically acclaimed history Australia: A Biography of a Nation.
These pages aim to provide an archive of the freelance pieces written by Phillip Knightley, as well as information about his life and work, with links to his books for those interested in reading further.
Phillip was the guest lecturer last night at City University’s Graduate School of Journalism in a talk titled Adventures in Journalism: Tall Tales and True Scoops.
The lecture was written up by Journalism.co.uk, a short excerpt of which is below (click here for the full story).
Journalists working in a digital age should not underestimate the importance of ‘off-the-street’ whistleblowing, investigative journalist and author Phillip Knightley has said.
The transformation of newspapers into commercial machines is strangling investigative journalism and leaving huge scoops uncovered, Knightley said…. It was a ‘great mistake’ for newspapers to move from city centre premises to cheaper out-of-town locations, making access more difficult for potential sources.
The migration had severed one of the fundamental links between investigative journalists and their informants, Knightley argued. “A newspaper has got to be in the centre of things,” he said. “Prospective whistleblowers used to be able to walk down the northern side of Fleet Street and go past three or four newspapers.”
Published in The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 7, 26 April 2007
Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess
by S.J. Hamrick
Yale University Press, 297pp
Nothing, not even the spy fiction of John le Carré, Len Deighton, or Charles McCarry, compares with the real-life story of the Ring of Five. Not only was the group made up of five members of the British establishment—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who had signed up to serve communism as spies when they met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. But by virtue of their subsequent positions within the British government, they also succeeded in transferring thousands of the most sensitive military documents to their Russian handlers.
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Published in The Independent on Sunday, 26 November 2006.
The FSB has what in police parlance is called ‘previous form’
Alexander Litvinenko’s death is unlikely to be solved for months. There are as many theories about who killed the former KGB officer as there are reporters working on the story. For my money, the circumstantial evidence points to the FSB, who took over the KGB’s role and for whom Litvinenko once worked.
Few organisations have access to Polonium-210. It is made in nuclear reactors, and with a half-life of 138 days cannot be stored; it has to be made to order. It is an almost-perfect murder weapon, although in one sense the murderer was unlucky. If Litvinenko had not died in London where all the facilities existed to detect the Polonium-210, the cause might have remained a mystery. Litvinenko himself was in no doubt. “The bastards got me,” he told a friend.
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Published in The Independent on Sunday, 13 August 2006
We have been conned for years over our airport security.
There is something wrong with the Government’s version of our stunning success in thwarting the planned terrorist attack on aircraft bound from Britain to the United States, bombings that would have “caused loss of life on an unprecedented scale”. We are told that, thanks to the brilliance of our anti-terrorist forces, we have avoided another 9/11. Apparently faced with a bombing attack on a number of transatlantic aircraft, “part of the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War” (our Home Secretary, John Reid’s, words), we have rounded up the “main players” just in time, and they are all in custody.
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Published in The Daily Mail, 10 August 2006
There comes a time in every anti-terrorist operation for a decision dreaded by every officer involved: Is this the moment to strike? Ideally, an investigation should run as long as possible.
No officer, no matter how experienced, can tell for certain that every angle has been covered, every possibility for gathering intelligence has been exploited, and every fragment of evidence has been noted and catalogued. But these imperatives have to be balanced against the most important one of all - are the terrorists about to attack?
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Published in The Independent on Sunday, 10 July 2006.
‘He had all-round ability. There wasn’t a job in journalism he couldn’t do’
I joined The Sunday Times in 1965 and Harry Evans arrived shortly after. The paper was changing from an old-fashioned, Tory-orientated newspaper into a dynamic exposure paper, and he was a breath of fresh air.
The Insight team got going and you were seconded there when things got interesting. The idea was to tell people what was really going on. Evans’s role in that was absolute confidence in everybody working for him. He encouraged people to stretch themselves and never stinted on cost.
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Published in The Daily Mail, 6 June 2006
The anti-terrorist raid on a house in East London to search for a chemical bomb now appears to be just another botched operation: a suspect shot in murky circumstances, conflicting accounts and unanswered questions.
In fact, the real story of this raid is that infighting between MI5 and the police may have endangered the chance of a breakthrough in gathering anti-terrorist intelligence.
Information is the life-blood of a security service. Unlike the characters in novels or in the popular TV series Spooks, real-life MI5 officers rely on the sordid but well-tried techniques of the informer, the ‘grass’, the intercepted letter, the telephone tap and the bribe, all mixed in with a dash of blackmail and coercion.
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The ‘lucky country’s’ historic racism lingers, like a sun cancer, just below the skin
Published in The Independent, London, 14 December 2005
The race riots on Sydney’s beaches - Anglo-Australians (”Aussies”) versus Lebanese (”Lebs”) - have repercussions far beyond a drink fuelled punch-up on a sweltering summer week-end.
They have revealed that the “lucky country’s” historic racism lingers on, like a sun cancer just below the skin. Given the right circumstances all the advances of recent years - the abolition of the White Australia policy, the encouragement of a multi-cultural, multi-racial society with emphasis on tolerance and harmony - can apparently vanish overnight. There was time to act to avert trouble but no one had the will.
Two weekends ago, two surf lifesavers, icons in a leisure culture based on the beach, were assaulted by a group of Australians of Lebanese origin. The reasons for the assault are disputed but remarks by one side or the other about women appear to have played a part. Throughout last week the mobile telephone text network in Sydney ran hot as Anglo-Australians (they refer to themselves as “Aussies”) called for protest action. Australia’s top “shock jock”, Alan Jones of radio 2GB, took up the cause.
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