Journalists reporting on Gaza must distinguish between good and evil

After 40 years in this profession, I’ve little doubt that in the eyes of much of the general public, journalists are generally regarded as being about as worthy as something you would scrape off the sole of your shoe.   

How interesting it is then to see the current outpouring of sympathy and support filling newspaper comment forums and letters for the scores of my Palestinian colleagues in Gaza killed or wounded in the line of work. 

No doubt many of those expressing such views might usually be more inclined to tear strips of the media but suddenly things are different here. It’s a curious anomaly, but one I believe speaks volumes about how our profession is perceived in the eyes of many. For many folk you see there are two kinds of journalist.  

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One is the figure most love to hate because they write or tell things that such readers or viewers don’t agree with so are instantly tarnished as “hacks” or establishment “lickspittles”. 

The other is that paragon of virtue, the teller of truths, or to put it another way, the journalist who almost always reinforces the views of said reader or viewer and therefore is worthy of the epithet “journalist”. 

The fact is both have a role to play but many people outside journalism still have trouble distinguishing between what’s known as an op-ed or opinion piece and a straight news report. This I know for a fact, is constant source of frustration for many of my colleagues.  

Now let me be clear in what I’m saying here. Put in simple terms, a news report is just that, a factual account of what the reporter eyewitness sees or encounters before them, as opposed to the op-ed which I’m indulging in right here by expressing my own views on a subject or issue.  

That some news outlets around the world do indeed have an obvious or institutional news bias goes without saying. As the American essayist Walter Lippmann once pointed out: “Newspapers do not try to keep an eye on all mankind; by its nature, news is selective, dependent on editors’ as well as readers’ tastes.” 

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That some journalists behave in line with a “bias” or stoop to unethical practices of the sort that the Leveson Inquiry looked into in 2012 is also undeniable. All this gives journalism a bad rap, making a rod for the media’s own back that does our industry no favours.  

Which brings me back to the sympathy and support for those incredible colleagues in Gaza. The simple fact is that most people whatever their personal views or axes to grind, recognise genuinely committed, brave journalism of the kind that bears witness and holds power to account as journalism should always endeavour do. What we have witnessed in Gaza of late has been a shining example of that.  

Just ask yourself this question; what would we know of the catastrophic events and terrible human toll in Gaza were it not for those who despite great threat to their own lives and often that of their families, have stuck steadfastly to their role to inform the world? 

What’s really important to recognise too is that this frontline reporting has largely been undertaken by local journalists, men and women who cannot drop in and out of a war zones the way I or most of my other foreign correspondent colleagues can do.  

That the Israeli authorities have made access near impossible for foreign reporters is only part of the explanation and another sign that when given the chance governments and regimes will do all they can to conceal what is really going on.  

For the Israeli authorities to say that the decision to deny access to foreign journalists was taken in the interests of their safety when evidence suggests that Palestinian colleagues have been deliberately targeted, is an insult to all within our profession and those people who depend on such reporting to understand the reality of what is happening in Gaza. And so it has been down to our local Gaza colleagues in whose hands the reporter’s trade is something to be proud of.  

As my late war correspondent colleague Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times who herself was killed in the line of work in Syria once aptly put it, this means trying to find truths in a “sandstorm of propaganda, when armies, tribes or terrorists clash”.  

Finding such truths matter just as much right here at home as they do in far flung trouble spots. They matter not least – as Christiane Amanpour once said – when the “cacophony of opinion and ideology threatens to drown out the space reserved for facts”. 

These past weeks have seen a great loss within the ranks of those who carry the responsibility of exposing such truths. As of December 23, 2023, the media monitoring group the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), preliminary investigation showed that at least 68 journalists and media workers were among the more than 21,000 killed since the war in Gaza began on October 7. In short, the Israel-Gaza war has “led to the deadliest month” for journalists since the CPJ started gathering data in 1992. 

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Over the years much has been said about the so-called “journalism of attachment”, a phrase first coined by the genre’s unofficial founder, Martin Bell, the former BBC war correspondent. It was back in the 1990s, during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, that Bell made the case for a journalism that “cares as well as knows”. 

Journalists, said Bell, had a new “moral obligation” to distinguish between “good” and “evil” in conflict zones, and if necessary to take sides. In other words, it is fine to become emotionally “attached” and nothing to be professionally afraid of. It’s a view that I’ve always personally agreed with.  

Many in that time though have also warned that by emphasising attachment over neutrality, emotionalism over objectivity, the reporter is in danger of shifting role – becoming activist or campaigner rather than a one-step-removed dispassionate recorder of fact. 

I’ve often thought such fears were overblown and that a balance can be struck. The reporter who makes clear that he or she finds South African apartheid or the methods used by Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip to be unacceptable and abhorrent is doing nothing more than their job. 

Some of the best-ever journalism has come from such motivating factors. Think of Claude Cockburn’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, John Pilger – who died a few days ago – and Wilfred Burchett’s coverage of the Vietnam conflict or the South African newspaper editor and anti-apartheid activist Donald Woods, and you will understand what I mean. 

Above all else, journalism’s job is to give a voice to people who have no voice. Those journalists in Gaza, like many others around world, continue to do just that. I salute them for it and it’s good to see others doing likewise instead of tarring all media with the same brush.