This Is Jersey

EARLY last December, I was invited to a party. No, not an especially early pre-Christmas affair, but a Birthday Party – a very special one – marking 75 years of the BBC’s World Service.

Sadly, wind and fog in the Channel conspired to prevent my joining former colleagues, a dwindling band of idealists, émigrés and more experienced career professional journalists you could shake a stick at.

At their fingertips, recollections of broadcasting from tiny studios in wartime London, analysing conflicts-a-plenty, facing down editorial confrontations with governments both home and abroad, improvising flimsy equipment and jumping through all manner of hoops to get information back to London – and stumbling on isolated groups for whom listening to the World Service was a matter of religious must.

Anecdotes apart, things have moved on, as indeed they might – given Lord Reith’s unflattering expectation, when opening the then named ‘Empire Service’, that the output ‘would neither be very interesting nor very good’.

Now, the World Service commands an estimated 138 million listeners and many more web users. Its reputation, once based on ensuring that information is made available for those with little or no local access to a free press, now has to stand the test of comparison with other competing international media giants.

It has served as a beacon of honesty, integrity and courage which has inspired the international community. Indeed, the former UN Secretary General, Koffi Annan, described it as ‘perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world this century’.

When I’m next in London, I’ve been invited to visit the subject of another commemoration. This time, it’s the newly inaugurated memorial on the roof of Broadcasting House to those journalists who’ve lost their lives simply doing their job.

The glass and steel cone-shaped sculpture, entitled ‘Breathing’, was unveiled by the current UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on 16 June. Every evening at 10 pm it is illuminated for 30 minutes by a beam of light which extends a kilometre into the night sky.

The ceremony was timely. Days before came the news that two BBC World Service correspondents had been killed in separate incidents.

Nasteh Dahir Faraah, who worked for the BBC Somali service, was shot dead in the southern Somali city of Kismayo, and Abdul Samad Rohani, BBC Pashto reporter based in Kabul, was abducted and murdered in the southern Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Yet they are only two in the toll of more than a thousand journalists and others working in news who have been killed in the past ten years.

The high-profile reporting of conflicts in the Falklands, the Balkans and Iraq provided the occasional scare. Some correspondents have even courted glory by putting their heads above the parapet in trouble zones – we all know the names.

But the majority of international reporting, from some of the world’s most dangerous and inaccessible regions, comes from those dedicated to providing honest and accurate information, often braving the threats and dangers from those who fear exposure and would suppress disclosure by any means.

Zimbabwe and Burma now figure on the list of countries where the messenger is hunted down lest the tyranny is exposed, though the deliberate targeting of TV crews in the Middle East clearly demonstrates that the concept of neutrality which once protected the press is no longer generally respected.

Freedom of reporting has to rate as one of the most hypocritically abused liberties of modern time. It is championed and signed up from the rooftops – until there’s a hint of bad news arising.

Already a sensitive Beijing Games Organising Committee is creating difficulties for international broadcasters over the possibility of coverage of ‘sensitive’ activity during the games.

The BBC, for one, says it will cover all events relating to those games while exercising its normal editorial judgment, but already there have been difficulties with getting permits to bring in equipment to various locations in the country.

The indignation which filled the columns of our local media – both in the form of reasoned professional assessment and irate letters from the public, following the recent highly sensitive response to international reporting of the abuse inquiries at Haut de la Garenne and the debacle over the Waterfront, only serve to emphasise the luxury we take for granted to scrutinise and openly criticise the failings – and the perceived ones – of those elected to positions of authority over our daily lives.

While slaughter of the messenger may no longer be the penalty for bringing home bad news, it doesn’t totally eliminate all pressure for the message to be an ‘acceptable’ one. And that poses a further challenge. Who can forget the jingoistic reports of ‘our boys’ which found their way on to radio from the lips of those who should have known better during the Falklands War?

And, believe me, there was also much editorial soul-searching about placing correspondents among Coalition forces – so-called ‘embedding’ – during the Iraq war. The BBC was particularly concerned that this could compromise its reputation for objectivity. Nevertheless, in the midst of modern warfare, it was the only operational way reporters could be deployed.

In 2006, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1738, which condemned acts of violence, including deliberate attacks against journalists, media professionals and associated personnel in armed conflicts, and called on all parties to put an end to such practices.

The BBC’s own coat of arms, contrived in 1933 extols: ‘Nation should speak peace to nation’. Frankly, these days, I’d settle for ‘people should speak openly to one another’. In these dangerous times of spin, hype, hypocrisy, bare-faced lies, corruption and zealotry, it’s a motto which struggles to be heard.

Article posted on 2nd July, 2008 - 3.00pm