journalism

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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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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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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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.

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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.

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On the way down to Somerset to see the famous photographer, Don McCullin, for a man-to-man chat about war, women, and the meaning of life, I recalled that the last time we had done this was in the back of a taxi on the road between Suez and Cairo. The Six Day War was about to start and our attempt to get to the likely scene of action had been thwarted by our treacherous taxi-driver. He handed us over to the Egyptian security police who sent us packing. On the long drive back we reminisced about our early days in journalism. McCullin said that his break had not been - as legend has it - The Observer photographs of a youth gang in his home suburb of Finsbury Park, north London, but of something much more in keeping with his subsequent career.

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