Martin Bell has become the most important journalist in the country, even as he has given up full-time journalism. He has exchanged the life of a foreign correspondent for that of an independent member of parliament-the only one in the House of Commons-and thus has a bully pulpit for his views.
He will be attended with respect. The high profile he took in Bosnia, the courage he showed in grinding through a filthy war and returning to it after being wounded, made him a face and a voice of substance. The decision to stand against Neil Hamilton in Tatton at a time when the latter appeared to have a fighting chance of retaining the seat for the Conservatives was bold. Paul Johnson called him the "media's candidate," and although his column was written to dismiss him, it did describe well one part of his pitch. He won in part because television gave him the opportunity to become a particular kind of star: one defined (as true stars are) by his own nature rather than by the medium itself. He was the bloke who kept poking himself into hellholes; who spoke with a subdued emotion about the hideousness of the warlords who caused the savagery he showed.
But there was a deeper sense in which he was and remains the media's candidate. It lies in the attitude to life, to politics and to personal and public morality which he demonstrates-and which derives from the way in which reporters operate. In particular it derives from the way in which BBC reporters operate: it is a kind of public service television ethos, given a particular twist now because of the perception of many-Bell included-that the BBC is run by a management who know and care nothing of true news, and thus nothing of true values.
A few weeks after his election, Bell delivered four talks on Radio 4, named The Truth is Our Currency. It was a plea for a committed or principled style of reporting, a "journalism of attachment," one which would replace what Bell believes is a false objectivity and neutrality. In order to cheapen the latter, he puts the defence of it in the person of a "middle ranking BBC executive" who "countered my argument for a principled journalism with the old Shakespeare-derived notion of the function of news being to hold up a mirror to nature, or in this case to events in the world about us."
A "journalism of attachment," by contrast, "does not take sides... is not in the backing business but in the truth telling business. It is a journalism which is aware of the moral ground on which it operates, which cares as well as knows and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, victim and oppressor."
This is a hugely loaded plea: he does not stop there. He ended his first talk thus: "What can be the justification for a disengaged journalism which would require its practitioners, as special people with special privileges, to close their hearts to pity? That is a phrase with a certain moral resonance. There was in this century a military commander who urged his generals to do that-to close their hearts to pity. He enjoyed a measure of success. His name was Adolf Hitler."
There is a rough but serviceable rule of thumb that says arguments which have recourse to Hitler or Stalin are on weak ground. So it is here. To argue that pity for the victims of war should not be the dominant criterion for journalistic judgement, is not comparable to orders to annihilate peoples or states. To do so is to use a moral bludgeon.
If a moral bludgeon is the means, then the end becomes suspect. Bell makes some good points-particularly against the sanitisation of television images of war. His complaint that news is being "dumbed down" also has force-although in not even asking what people will willingly switch on to watch, he leaves the matter somewhat abstract.
But in none of his talks, adding up to one hour of radio in which he could say what he liked, does he manage to pin down how a "journalism of attachment" might work. The man who became Britain's best known war correspondent, and is now an MP with a unique position to discourse on public journalism, has in his first essay made a moral claim without granting it a foundation.
To what do reporters decide to be attached? Are most wars, especially today's civil conflicts, so open to judgement as to which side is right, which wrong? Are reporters able to point to the original sin and the unsullied virtue? Is it so clear to reporters-whose job includes getting through war zones, making sure they can get their transmissions out, competing with rivals for the most graphic shot-what is good and what is evil, day by day?
"The truth," Bell ends, "is our currency. It is all that we deal in-truth and trust. And if we lose one, we shall forfeit the other." Reporters make stabs at truth, contribute to a mosaic which may, usually later rather than sooner, be arranged in a pattern which gives some clarity. Reporters can get at some bits of the facts-which are almost always contradictory, capable of being framed in a myriad of ways. They are assisted by some working definition of objectivity, for only thereby can competing claims at least get a hearing. It does mean that evil is given a space within which to deploy its arguments. The alternative is that the journalist decides what is evil, and suppresses or denounces it. And to use Bell's rhetoric, stalin did that.n
