journalism

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.

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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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This brilliant but enormous book (no less than 1,366 pages) has been sixteen years in the making. Its obvious ingredients are 328,000 notes, documents and dispatches and Robert Fisk’s thirty years’ experience of reporting the Middle East. But there is also a hidden element - the author’s ethical, philosophical and moral approach to his life’s work.

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A couple of years ago at Britain’s premier literary festival, Hay-on-Wye, two star performers dominated the programme: ex-President Bill Clinton and journalist/author/commentator Christopher Hitchens. Clinton arrived in his Secret Service car, attended a few parties, hit a few golf balls, made a politically-stirring speech and departed to a boo or two for keeping a crowd of well-wishes waiting.

Hitchens arrived jet-lagged after a seven-hour plane trip from America and four-hour car journey from London, dishevelled and clearly under the spell of an indeterminate number of whiskies. To the barely-concealed alarm of the festival organisers, he went to the performers’ hospitality room and ordered more. It was going to be a long-night.

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This is a book about two Fergal Keanes. The first part tells in lyrical terms of his boyhood in an Ireland that has since disappeared. His father Eamonn was an actor whose talent was sabotaged by a lifelong love of drink that ruined his marriage and alienated him for many years from his son.

In fact, drink runs like a leitmotif through the book. In Keane’s early days in journalism, one gets the impression that there was hardly a reporter on the Irish papers who was sober long enough to write a story. Practical jokes were common, the victims usually junior journalists. One was sent to a council meeting to deliver to the city manager an important letter about the approaching St Patrick’s Day celebrations. The manager interrupted a speech, heaved with laughter and passed the letter back to the reporter. It read, “My name is John Breen and I want my arse painted green for St Patrick’s Day.”

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Paul Foot’s death last week is an even greater tragedy than realised: it marked the end of investigative reporting in Britain as we have known it. Foot’s working life spanned what can now be seen as a golden age for investigative and campaigning journalism, before greedy proprietors and their cost-cutting accountants killed it off.

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The Daily Mirror’s admission that its photographs of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners were fakes only highlights the importance of images in this war. It was the Mirror’s demand for visual evidence to support its informants’ claims of abuse by British soldiers - claims which are likely to prove correct - that led to the faking of the photographs. We should have seen it coming because in no other war have iconic images played such a major role in the outcome or changed public perception so radically.

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The Pentagon made it clear from the beginning of the war against Iraq that there would be no censorship. What it failed to say was that war correspondents might well find themselves in a situation similar to that in Korea in 1950. This was described by one American correspondent as the military saying: “You can write what you like - but if we don’t like it we’ll shoot you.” The figures in Iraq tell a terrible story. Fifteen media people dead, with two missing, presumed dead. If you consider how short the campaign was, Iraq will be notorious as the most dangerous war for journalists ever. This is bad enough. But - and here we tread on delicate ground - it is a fact that the largest single group of them appear to have been killed by the American military.

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Before we get around to revealing the names of the murderers, I think I’d better anticipate some of the criticism that my colleagues in the journalism game might throw at me. You know, that helpful constructive criticism on the lines of ‘here’s another old-fart-looking-back-at-the-Golden-Age-of-journalism-that-never-really-existed’. Let’s pre-empt that. More by luck than skill I spent most of my 60 years in journalism in, yes, the Golden Age, and the comparison I have to make is between that age and what passes for journalism today.

I started as a copyboy for David McNichol senior on the old Daily Telegraph. Remarkably, for a columnist who spent his later years as a bon viveur, McNichol kept me busy running down Castlereagh Street to the greasy Greeks to bring him back a double hamburger with egg (on which he seemed to thrive). I got my break on the Northern Star in Lismore as a cadet reporter, doing what I have since termed ‘public service journalism’: keeping the people of Lismore informed of what was going on around them - CWA meetings, town council meetings, swimming carnivals, speeches by the mayor, interviews with the sergeant of police. This was great training. You have to get the names right, or your readers will stop you in the street the next day to complain.

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