When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. John Simpson

  2. W. N. Ewer

  3. Walter Duranty

  4. Guy Burgess

  5. John Peet

  6. Reg Foster and Brendan Mulholland

  7. Charles Wheeler

  8. Frederick Forsyth

  9. Martin Bell

  10. Sidney Bernstein

  11. Sandy Gall

  12. Lindsey Hilsum

  13. Andrew Gilligan

  14. The Hackers

  15. The Morals of the Stories

  Appendix

  Endnotes

  Picture Credits

  Index

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  British journalists are not very interested in reading rules that someone has written for them. One of the country’s most respected correspondents, the late Charles Wheeler, once admitted he’d never seen and never read a copy of the BBC’s editorial guidelines. His own guideline was ‘push it as far as you can but make sure you get it right’.

  Rather than quoting guidelines, regulatory codes or media laws, reporters and editors prefer to talk about ‘crossing a line’. But in the fiercely competitive world of daily print and broadcast journalism there has rarely been the time or the inclination to agree where this ‘line’ is. No one even seems to have tried to define it.

  So our title When Reporters Cross the Line is, in part, a rhetorical device. If no one agrees where the line is how can anybody decide whether it has been crossed or not?

  We have found media men and women who have accidentally or deliberately strayed across loosely defined ethical lines but also those who proudly and defiantly marched across conventions believing their cause was justified.

  This investigation is therefore part celebration of British print and broadcast journalism and part exposure. The case studies do not claim to be representative of journalism or journalists; instead they help us, in our concluding chapter, to point towards where exactly such a line should be.

  Most of the chapters are the story of an individual reporter who made a decision which created controversy. We set out to find more about these people than was previously available. The more we researched the more we discovered that some of those regarded as heroes by journalists had less than heroic moments. And others thought to be villains may have had a case for their defence. Often the people we researched turned out to be caught up in moments when the worlds of media, propaganda, politics, espionage and crime collided or overlapped. In one case a reporter was at various times, and sometimes simultaneously, a distinguished newspaper correspondent, a Russian spy and a secret British propagandist.

  Some of these case studies may appear to be issues from an analogue past but they still have implications in this digital world where audiences – readers, viewers and listeners – increasingly have to make their own judgements about the credibility of the media they consume. This is a long view of journalism that looks back to try to help us look forward.

  Jeff Hulbert and I have combined archive research with new interviews which we have conducted with those involved in episodes over the past eighty years. We have also added my own experiences in the news business over the second half of that period. When I offer those personal thoughts I write in the first person and am happy to accept any credit or blame for them.

  It is ten years since Paddy Coulter, then at the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, nursed me through my four Visiting Professor lectures on ‘Crossing the Line: borderline judgements in broadcast news’. I am grateful to him and to Simon Albury, then chief executive of the Royal Television Society, who encouraged me to believe that the Oxford lectures had an after-life, initially as a one-off lecture at the RTS in London.

  My thanks to Martin Rosenbaum and Helen Grady at BBC Radio, who converted my pitch for a series of ‘Crossing the Line’ programmes into a single well-received programme. And to the unnamed BBC scheduler who thought When Reporters Cross the Line was a better title.

  Our editor at Biteback, Sam Carter, gave us the invaluable advice ‘write the book you want to write’, which is what we’ve done.

  Most of all my thanks to Jeff Hulbert, who has been my partner in this project from the first night at Oxford when he manned the video projector through the countless days he spent researching in British archives to the hours we have spent together writing and subbing this book. I know he would also want me to thank his partner, Lesley Newman, for being so understanding and supportive. Jeff and I are very grateful to Angela Frier, who read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. We are also grateful to the many archivists at the National Archives and the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham and to Anna Sander at Balliol College, Oxford for their help. And I’m deeply grateful for the support of my wife Jacqui Marson, whose own book The Curse of Lovely was also published this year and will undoubtedly outsell this volume.

  Stewart Purvis

  City University London

  2013

  1

  JOHN SIMPSON

  In October 2012 the BBC was facing ‘its worst crisis in fifty years’. The judgement came from a BBC reporter whose reputation and status were so high that he could make that kind of bold statement about his own employers without worrying about the impact on his career prospects.

  The crisis was the BBC’s handling of the allegations that the late Jimmy Savile, a TV and radio star made by the BBC, had sexually molested children on its premises for many years.

  The pundit was John Simpson, the world affairs editor of the BBC, now a stocky, white-haired man, wearing a sad, even downcast, expression, talking to a BBC programme investigating the BBC. Variously billed as a ‘veteran foreign correspondent’ (The Times) and a ‘respected BBC correspondent’ (The Sun), what he said on the Panorama programme was picked up by all the major newspapers and broadcast news bulletins.

  For that brief moment, rather than reporting the news, John Simpson was the news. As someone who had absolutely no involvement whatsoever in the scandal, he was the respectable unofficial, but decently authoritative, voice of the BBC; a voice of calm reason, of reassurance. In short, a person that one could still trust to uphold the BBC’s standards in time of crisis.

  Yet six months before, as if to prove that none of us in journalism is perfect, John Simpson had decided after many years to say ‘sorry’ for something he had done. He had accused rivals of ‘profoundly misleading’ reporting giving rise to ‘a false impression about one of the major events of the decade’. And he had been proved wrong.

  The decade in question was the 1990s and the event was the battle for Bosnia. The country, if at the time it could be called that, was in the grip of a bloody and horrific civil war; and much of it was being played out nightly on the world’s television screens.

  At the start of the decade the former Yugoslavia was crumbling into chaos and civil war. A decade before, and after delivering four decades of strong leadership, Josip Broz, known as Tito, had died. During his battles with the Nazis the partisan leader had delivered his orders in his native Croat: ‘Ti to, ti to’, which translates as ‘you will do this, you will do that’. His staff heard it so many times that it became a natural nickname for him.1 His subsequent autocratic presidential style meant that there were no natural successors waiting in the wings to take over; in the resulting power vacuum that followed his death in 1986 there was little prospect of keeping the state together. The tensions between the very diverse ethnic and cultural populations soon saw separatist processes spiralling out of control; and eventually they became unstoppable. Very swiftly the parts of the Yugoslav federation that were rather more ethn
ically and culturally homogenous, Slovenia and Croatia, seceded although even then it was not without a bloody fight with the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), which was Serb dominated.

  Then in 1992 Bosnia and Herzegovina broke away. But, unlike Slovenia and Croatia, it was highly diverse ethnically and culturally; and a long, bloody and brutal civil war ensued in which Muslim Bosniaks were pitched against Bosnian Serbs, who were Eastern Orthodox Christians. To this was added the complication posed by a sizeable Bosnian Croat minority, which was predominantly Roman Catholic and populated western and southern parts of the state. Everywhere there were close-knit ethnic communities, ‘enclaves’, which were dotted around larger swathes of land that were predominantly populated by people from the opposing ethnic community. It was as if the pattern on a pedigree Dalmatian’s coat had been transformed into geographical reality.

  But there was a further complication: Bosnian Serbs declared themselves separate from the rest of Bosnia and formed a state within a state that was to become known as Republika Srpska. It was a part of a plan that had been mooted several years earlier to create a greater Serbia, to unite Serb-speaking peoples who had been deliberately divided by the Yugoslavian Communist regime.2 It was led by a former psychiatrist, Radovan Karadžić; he and his military chief, a former Yugoslav army general, Ratko Mladić, were unofficially aided and abetted in their political and military activities by the rump of the former Yugoslavia, which was then led by the Serbian nationalist politician and supporter of a Greater Serbia, Slobodan Milošević. To achieve ethnically homogenous statehood would mean encouraging people from other ethnic groups to move to other parts of the country so that they could live among their own ethnic group, but it would not be easy. Such a simple if questionable concept very quickly came to be translated into a brutal reality. The world’s media picked up the plans and with it the description ‘ethnic cleansing’. The term was a hygienic way of describing a reality that was far removed from that: a reality where force, intimidation and murder became widespread and ethnic tensions, rivalries and hatred boiled over, quid pro quo.

  The Bosniak Muslim side, which was led by Alija Izetbegović, sought to defend itself and to hold on to territory it feared would be lost, thus threatening its very viability. Izetbegović’s administration also received help and support from outside, from countries including Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; and sometimes various Western powers also lent a hand, but less overtly.3

  There were times when the fight became an uneasy alliance between Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat against Bosnian Serb, and other occasions where it was a three-cornered fight. The terrain was harsh and difficult to take: a fact already acknowledged by the Roman Emperor Trajan’s legions in the first century AD and by Hitler’s armies over 1,800 years later. There were massacres, war crimes and devastations. No side was entirely blameless, although some were seen as being less blameworthy than others.

  Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, which still showed some of its former Austro-Hungarian provincial heritage, was overlooked by hills which, when the city was put under siege by the Bosnian Serbs, formed vantage points for many snipers and artillery emplacements. The world watched as pictures, sanitised to spare television audiences the brutal reality of war, illustrated stories about snipers, the mortaring of market places and the devastations to which the city’s population were subjected.4 The pathos of stories about people killed as they dashed to fill up water bottles or shopped for food put many of the world’s politicians under pressure about why they appeared not to be doing anything to stop the slaughter. Stories about other places in Bosnia were less widespread because there was the considerable and recurring problem confronting journalists when reporting from the world’s danger zones: access.

  Access was a real problem: not only getting access, but when there being able to gather evidence and eyewitness testimonies to support the stories and keep safe; then there was the problem of getting the stories out and into the public domain. Without access the stories that circulated could be, and often were, taken only as rumour or exaggeration. This suited many – including politicians who wished to remain incurious, for whatever ‘higher’ policy reasons – since they could be dismissed and the lack of evidence cited precisely as the reason for not taking action at all, while others were posturing and looking for political advantage.5 To this was added the fact that many journalists were not entirely trusted by the combatants precisely because they did not take sides, and so were considered potentially hostile to individual causes.

  As the civil war developed stories of dark deeds and dreadful conditions were emerging, but for many of them it was impossible to check the details. And as is so often the case with conflicts details were frequently denied, obfuscated, invented or exaggerated by combatants, their opponents and their supporters; and the problem was compounded by others who had interests in muddying the waters and keeping what they or others were doing hidden from view. This created a problem of perception and understanding, according to Oxford academic John Burns. He wrote that among the news media ‘few would admit to deliberate bias and yet the Yugoslav civil wars … demonstrate the clearest examples of one-sided reporting from a pack psychology among journalists’.6 His assertion was supported by John Simpson, who wrote that it was ‘certainly true that there was a powerful pro-Muslim lobby among the British and American journalists in Bosnia’ and they were fiercely competitive when it came to uncovering ‘wrongdoing on the part of the Serbs, which was very considerable, and not all the facts were checked too carefully’.7

  Camps

  Shortly after the civil war began rumours were circulating about populations being forcibly uprooted from their homes and moved to other parts of the country: ethnic cleansing – then still a new term – in action. In July 1992, two journalists, Roy Gutman of New York Newsday and Maggie O’Kane of The Guardian, revealed to the world the existence of Bosnian Serb-controlled camps. Gutman wrote about a camp at Manjača, which he said was called by Republika Srpska’s army a prisoner-of-war camp, but he also attributed to an unnamed US embassy official in Belgrade the description of the Bosnian camps as concentration camps.8 Two days later, on 21 July, he wrote about the cleansing of Banja Luka, where Muslims were moved out of the city ‘in sealed freight trains’.9

  Maggie O’Kane, in her report which was published in The Guardian on 29 July, used the term ‘concentration camp’ to describe a camp at Trnopolje. In total she used the term four times.10 On 2 August 1992 Roy Gutman wrote an article headlined ‘Death Camps’. It began, ‘The Serb conquerors of northern Bosnia have established two concentration camps in which more than a thousand civilians have been executed or starved and thousands more are being held until they die…’11

  ‘Concentration camps’, that chilling expression from those reports, would inevitably have conjured up in many people’s minds a direct association with the camps operated by the Nazis before and during the Second World War. The mental pictures produced by those two words would have been the iconic images that circulated widely after the war depicting hollow-eyed skeletal inmates dressed in broad-striped camp garb. But historically that was not what other concentration camps had been. The Nazi model had been a distortion, a gross perversion.

  Concentration camps had been developed decades before the Second World War, as a policy response to handling large numbers of civilians caught up in zones of conflict.12 They had been used by the Spanish when suppressing a revolt in Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century and a couple of years later the idea was taken forward by the British in the Boer War. The British had originally intended them to provide shelter and sustenance for a refugee population that had fled, or been forcibly removed by General Kitchener’s forces, who were conducting scorched earth warfare against Boer guerrilla forces. They had been ‘rough and ready’ constructions situated along railway lines to aid removal of inmates away from the war zone. There had been separate camps for black and white. However, a mix of harsh regimes, management incom
petence, food shortages and overcrowding led to insanitary conditions, disease and death. There was also the point that the camps – undoubtedly for some of the inmates – applied pressure and sought to break the Boer spirit, the will to resist. What had started out as a relatively humanitarian policy became a disaster, in real terms, but in London, the imperial capital, they were a disaster in political and propaganda terms too.13

  A couple of decades later the Nazi experience was an altogether different and much darker story. Concentration camps had been established soon after Adolf Hitler took office as Germany’s Chancellor in January 1933. Initially, they were designed to hold political opponents, but as time moved on their role quickly changed and they became the places where all of Nazi society’s ‘undesirables’ were sent, usually for some form of harsh treatment and punishment. By the war’s end – just twelve years after Hitler’s rise to power – it is known that there had been hundreds of concentration camps, and many of their names became synonymous with true hell on earth. In that relatively short time, and as peace changed into war, the numbers of inmates, executions and deaths increased massively, aided by uncompromisingly criminal and brutal camp regimes. The numbers dying from hunger, disease, overcrowding, neglect and overwork rocketed. But maybe surprisingly these were not death camps, in the sense of being centres where mass murder was practised as a deliberate policy. Many were labour camps and detention centres where inmates were expected to work on industrial production lines. The distinction between death camps and labour camps may have been relatively fine, however, when it came to death, as labour camp inmates faced only overwork, undernourishment and, usually, a slower death from malnutrition and disease.14

  Extermination camps were distinct from concentration camps. They were industrial killing facilities and were few in number; they drove forward the Nazis’ ‘final solution’ plans. Three operated under what became known as Operation Reinhard. They were purpose-built extermination centres – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Each was operational for two years or less but in that time they were responsible for the deaths of millions. A powerful and uncompromising description of what happened in them is provided by Gitta Sereny’s book about Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka.15 When those camps’ work was deemed complete they were bulldozed and hidden from view: farmsteads were built and settled, trees and flowers were planted to cover their traces.16 Three other industrial killing centres, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Chełmno, also operated, but they were a part of the wider concentration camp system.17