Does international journalism still serve human rights?

I am just off to speak at a 'round table' on whether 'with forgotten wars and murdered reporters, international journalism still serves the cause of democracy and human rights'.

There are to be distinguished men and and women around this table - the Cuban campaigner and long-time prisoner of Castro, Armando Valladares, Emma Bonino, Jean Daniel and others.

I am just wondering what to say - and wondering particularly about the word 'still' before the phrase 'serves the cause'.

Editors of The Times get used to talking about the origins of 'international reporting'. Our William Howard Russell pioneered the practice from the Crimea in the 1850s.

There were certainly the rights of humans at issue then but not the kind that human rights campaigners speak most of now. The rights were predominantly those of the wounded British soldiers who were neglected by their officers and government. There was a Times campaign. Enter the Florence Nightingales.

There have been various recent court cases in which, after newspaper pressure, human rights law has been deemed to apply to our ill-equipped soldiers in Iraq too. Maybe we'll talk about that later on.

Generally, at events like the one I'm about to join, the speakers want to talk about the rights of civilians in war or the rights of the fighters for the cause in which they most believe. This is often not that of the British and Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I return to that word 'still'.

Reporters, for all their aims of impartiality, generally want to lean to one side or another in any conflict. They are story-tellers and a story needs a teller witha point of view, shifting sometimes, but a viewpoint none the less.

Sometimes they choose that view point. More often it is dictated by the place from which they are looking. The real-life reporters shown in Waugh's Scoop failed to report the Italian victories in Abyssinia because they were with the losing side, the side of future 'human rights' activists, as it happened, so that will probably be judged today as a 'good try'.

In the First World War, the British contingent lied and deceived their readers about our armies' successes. But if the defeat of the Kaiser can be deemed a victory for human rights, the 'embedded' press helped that too. So another 'good try', even a win, though of an awkwardly different kind.

In a modern air war, like that in Yugoslavia in 1999 where there are no casualties on our own side and every bomber is home for supper, the reporter is thousands of feet from his own side's action and must inevitably seek the story with the victims on the ground. That is wholly regardless of which side in the war is best likely to advance human rights, in that case, I guess, the bombers.

Our conference will probably get on to lies told in the human rights cause by Arthur Koestler and Claud Cockburn in the Spanish Civil War. I hope so.

Journalism was too slow to stop the masacres in Rawanda and too bored to worry about how the victims-turned-victors are abusing the rights of their former killers.

Sometmes international reporters have assuredly helped the cause of human rights. Sometimes they have not. My sense is that this pattern remains still true today.

There must be much more to say. I'm looking forward to listening my colleagues and will report back later.  

Comments

[Christina O'Shaughnessy]

Would you mind substantiating the following allegation:

"Our conference will probably get on to lies told in the human rights cause by Arthur Koestler and Claud Cockburn in the Spanish Civil War. I hope so".

Thank you.

[peter stothard]

Since Armando Valladares, my fellow speaker in Ischia last night, is a distinguished Cuban dissident and 22-year prisoner of Castro, I thought in advance that the issue of truth and lies in the reporting of the Spanish Civil War would come up in our conversation about the media, war and human rights. As it happened, it did not. We did speak about how British war correspondents misled their readers in the First World War - all in the cause of winning future advantage, including greater human rights. Sr Valladares berated passionately the deceipts of Cuban journalists in the cause of Castros's communism. We failed to get on to how corerspondents on both sides behaved in Spain in the 1930s. A recent lengthy correspondence in the TLS had prepared me well for that. As for Koestler and Cockburn specifically, I don't have my books with me for full reference but I know that there is a good, readable account by my old friend Philip Knightley in his classic work on journalism, truth and war, The First Casualty.

[Karl Kraut]

The trouble with truth apparently being The First Casualty of war, is that it suggests journalism to be truthful in times of peace.