Some reporters pride themselves on their neutrality and objectivity. Michael Nicholson, the veteran ITN war correspondent, is not such a reporter. This is a man who smuggled an orphan out of besieged Sarajevo, turned himself and the girl in at Heathrow, and subsequently adopted her; a man who argues that the TV company lawyers who police the rules against biased broadcasting “are the latest, severest and best-paid censors and they pretend to be on our side.”
Small wonder, then, that his pocket history of war reporting, told largely through the lives of six famous journalists, focuses on radicals and romantics; political activists and independent mavericks. Though Clare Hollingworth is from a different mould – a fearless scrutineer of battle positions and military capabilities – the other five focused on the human faces of war, bringing home to their readers the chaos, misery and degradation of conflict.
Starting in the Victorian era, Nicholson profiles William Howard Russell – “a man of war who, to his dying days, found no glory in it.” Then Frederic Villiers, the swashbuckling war artist who covered 21 conflicts and ended his career by depicting the horrors of the trenches. Henry Nevinson campaigned against poverty and for the Suffragettes, “writing not just what I see but what I feel”, then publicly condemned the British campaigns in the Boer War and Gallipoli – the first for its inhumanity to the local populace, and the second for senselessly wasting Commonwealth lives. Martha Gellhorn, who spent years reporting on World War II and Vietnam, “was guided by a deep-hearted, deep-seated concern for justice, for the dispossessed, the oppressed, the neglected.” And finally James Cameron, the socialist and pacifist who admitted to being “subjective about everything I have ever done.”
As Nicholson considers what made these six people great journalists, it becomes clear that one factor is their use of the written word. TV news, writes this TV newsman, is subject to the “tyranny” of time constraints. In TV reporting the “stories are never complete”, he says, while films are sanitised to spare audiences “the horror of the detail.” The ever-growing demands of a 24-hour media, the continuing cuts to newsgathering operations, and the growing targeting of journalists by combatants conspire to further weaken TV reporters’ ability to give a true picture – and that’s when they can escape the manipulative embrace of western militaries.
In the end, Nicholson appears uncomfortable with his profession: he’s a “war profiteer”, he writes, drawn into combat zones to witness the killing – not to stop it. James Cameron, a witness whose passion was not constrained by enforced neutrality or 20-second timeslots, “raised journalism to the high point of literature” – but television journalists, Nicholson believes, “cannot equal the lives of those you have read about”. So watch the News at Ten for dramatic pictures of men firing artillery and waving AK-47s – but pick up a newspaper for the deeper truths of what happens when man takes up arms against his fellow man.
By Michael Nicholson
Biteback Publishing
£20