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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
A special Evatt Sunset Seminar, Investigative Journalism: Phillip Knightley with Chris Masters, was held today at the Seymour Theatre Centre in Sydney.
The following is taken from the Evatt Foundation website:
The Evatt Foundation proudly presents a pre-dinner public seminar on The Death of Investigative Journalism and Who Killed It? Featuring Phillip Knightley with Chris Masters
“The age of the war correspondent as hero is clearly over”, concluded Phillip Knightley in the recent edition of his classic study, The First Casualty. As the world awaits war, governments, their spin doctors, propagandists and military commanders will intensify their focus on controlling the media. History suggests that lies, manipulation, news management, distortion, omission, slant and gullible coverage will be the order of the day.
Let’s get the bad stuff over first. Robert Capa was a liar, a compulsive gambler, a depressive, a heavy drinker, and a womaniser (especially with prostitutes). He used people, broke promises and when he was accused of being a communist and the U.S. State Department kept his passport, he “named names”, to get it back.
At the urging of the appalling Henry Luce, the founder of Life and producer of the March of Time newsreel series, he staged Republican attacks on Fascist positions during the Spanish Civil War and filmed them, noting that they looked “more real” than if they had actually taken place. And, I maintain, he faked the most famous war photograph of all time, the Spanish soldier at the moment of death.
So more than half the population of Britain wants to live abroad and their first choice among non-English-speaking countries is Spain.
So more than half the population of Britain wants to live abroad and their first choice among non-English-speaking countries is Spain. Down here on the Balearic island of Ibiza this news has raised a few delighted chuckles among the locals. They presume that the Brits longing for exile are the same high-spenders who flock here during August, the height of the clubbing season, and who pay up to £50 a head to join 10,000 other ravers at Privilege, officially the world’s biggest nightclub. It is more likely, however, that they resemble me, wanderers in the autumn of their life who admire the Spanish, especially the Ibicencos, for their gentle hedonism, tolerance, loyalty, good manners and recognition of what is important in this world and what is froth.
Before Tony Blair joins the new crusaders trying to impose a “regime change”, a Western “settlement” on Iraq, he should at least look at the historical facts that explain the rise of nationalist leaders such as Saddam Hussein. And while he is at it, since he is good at empathy, he might try looking at Britain through Iraqi eyes. Seen from Baghdad, the British have bombed and invaded their country, lied to them, manipulated their borders, imposed on them leaders they did not want, kidnapped ones they did, fixed their elections, used collective terror tactics on their civilians, promised them freedom and then planned to turn their country into a province of India populated by immigrant Punjabi farmers. Small wonder that the author Said Aburish said to me recently: “If you think Saddam Hussein is a hard man to deal with, just wait for the next generation of Iraqi leaders.”
