JOURNALISM - Unreliable Sources: How the 20th Century Was ReportedBy John Simpson Macmillan, 593pp. £20
'IN A FREE SOCIETY," writes John Simpson towards the end of Unreliable Sources, "it is the role of the press to tell people what is going on, as honestly as possible, and allow them to make up their own minds." It is difficult to disagree with this.
Indeed, it sounds like something that ought to be pinned up prominently in every newsroom. However, what is most remarkable about Simpson’s survey of the reporting of events from the Boer War to the first Gulf War is how often this fundamental principle has been brushed aside in the interests of patriotism or profit, or simply when a journalist has lost sight of the task at hand. If, as the old adage has it, journalists write the first draft of history, Simpson sets out to show that those drafts are frequently in need of revision.
As the BBC's world-affairs editor, Simpson has written a report from the heart of the institution whose history he traces. Indeed, he is one of its senior figures, whose distinctions include three Baftas and a Richard Dimbleby Award and having been called a "precious arsehole" by Tony Blair for his coverage of the Serbian response to the bombing of Belgrade in 1999. Given his embeddedness in British media culture, a more accurate (if more cumbersome) title for the volume would have been How the 20th Century was Reported by the British Media, or even How the Bits of the 20th Century that Involved Britain were Reported by the British Media. As such, what we have is a narrative whose high (or low) points are the Boer War, the two World Wars, the Abdication and Suez crises, Thatcherism and the current war in Iraq, as reported by papers such as the Times, the Guardian, the Daily Mailand the Sun, as well as, to a lesser extent, the BBC and independent broadcasters.
Naturally enough, Ireland has a couple of walk-on roles in this drama. For Simpson, events in Ireland acted on more than one occasion as a jolt of truth serum for the British press. While the term “jingoism” was not actually coined in the Boer War (that had happened a couple of decades earlier), it certainly helped to define it. If in terms of combat it was the first modern war, in terms of reporting it was very much a Victorian war, with embedded journalists writing of soldiers marching “proud and beaming to meet death”, while tactfully avoiding mention of the concentration camps for Boer civilians.
Likewise, in the interests of keeping up morale during the first World War, journalists such as W Beach Thomas of the Daily Mailsent back reports of soldiers munching sandwiches and reading newspapers (the Mail, of course) "at the very centre of the battle". Such reports understandably infuriated the soldiers in the trenches. Simpson pulls from the BBC archives the later testimony of a soldier who had fought at the Somme, recalling that in his trench someone had nailed up a copy of the Daily Mail, with a boy's-own account of battle by an "eyewitness". On it was scrawled in red pencil: "If the bastard comes here, kill him." "The mistrust of what the press wrote," comments Simpson, "remains to this day."
The 1916 Rising and its aftermath, by contrast, were both closer to home and a different kind of conflict. At the beginning of the Rising, the automatic trust of military sources that characterised earlier reporting held sway. The Daily Express, for instance, headlined its account of the Rising "Crazy Rebellion in Ireland". However, as it gradually became clear that official versions of events such as the Croke Park massacre were not credible, journalists such as Hugh Martin of the Daily News were less and less inclined to accept what they were told. It was thus in Ireland, Simpson claims, that we saw the first real signs of the British media questioning officialdom. He picks up this idea again later in the volume, when his narrative reaches the 1970s and 1980s, when he reports that many British journalists treated army and IRA communiques with equal circumspection. And yet, Simpson suggests, it is precisely at such moments, when there is no easy version of the truth to report, that great journalists separate themselves from the rest of the pack – with Robert Fisk providing the obvious example, calibrating his moral compass in Northern Ireland before moving on to the Middle East.
Indeed, one of the lessons running through Unreliable Sourcesis the continuing necessity for courageous individual journalists to tell the truth. From Philip Pembroke Stephens (one of the first British journalists of the early 1930s to see the Nazis for what they were) to better-known figures such as Clare Hollingsworth (whose remarkable career began in the 1930s and extended long past her official retirement in 1981), the story of the British media, for Simpson, is often the struggle of individual journalists against the emotional pull of wartime patriotism, political influence or the powerful interests of newspaper owners such as Lord Northcliffe or Rupert Murdoch. Nor does Simpson exempt himself from such high expectations. So, while we might not expect a defender of the free press to provide a balanced and impartial account of the Daily Mail'ssupport for Hitler, wartime censorship or the self-interested role of the Sunin Margaret Thatcher's rise to power, Simpson attempts all of these things. As such, Unreliable Sourcesis more than a book about the necessity for good journalism in a democracy: it is a living demonstration of its own demanding creed by one of its most accomplished practitioners.
Chris Morash is professor of English at NUI Maynooth. His most recent book, A History of the Media in Ireland, is published by Cambridge University Press. He chairs the compliance committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland
