Rory Peck Trust Award

Awards Dinner, Monday October 14 1996

Chairman. Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a special honour to have been invited to talk to you tonight to honour a brave journalist who lost his life in carrying out his job. As an almost totally studio bound broadcaster, I feel rather out of place and certainly very awed to be in the presence of so many who have risked their lives to get the news stories that make up the current affairs programmes and bulletins that the likes of me then front. The worst we have to face is the possibility of scrambled egg hitting us in the face - trivial by comparison with those of you in the field.

That said, this distance gives me the chance to say things about the business you are in that you might hesitate to say yourselves. If so, then I hope it helps .

First, it is, sadly, no surprise that since the first Rory Peck Award ceremony, the number of cameramen killed has risen still further. Between 1992 and 1996, according to the Amsterdam based Journalists' Safety Service, the total number of dead has gone up to 23. Chronologically, Rory Peck comes 12th on that dire list.

Each one of them has a poignant story behind their death and represents a warning to those who risk their limbs or lives to get the news that enlivens or depresses the nation's evening living rooms. Take Dominique Lonneux, a Belgian cameraman working for Mexican television in Bosnia. He was following a convoy of blue helmets, yet the single bullet fired at that convoy hit Lonneux in the head. Was that an accident, a stray and unlucky bullet that just had his number on it? It does not sound like it.

Take Viktor Pimenov, filming for the pro-Moscow national tv station in Grozny. He was shot in the back by a sniper from the 16th floor of a nearby tower block. He was singled out as a target obviously.

Or take, David Bolkvade, a WTN freelance working in Georgia in October 1993. He and his colleagues were arrested by pro-Gamsakhourdia militia.. Bolkvade was accused of espionage by them and his body was found riddled by bullets. No accident there, no doubt about what happened.

In June 1996, that excellent journal "Index on Censorship" which keeps a regular tally of attacks on all journalists, reported the story of an AP TV news crew who were merely robbed in Grozny. They escaped with their lives but left carrying a warning from their captors: "All journalists are spies and you will have to be killed".

It is not only in war action that cameramen get killed. Take this case from Japan, where a tv cameraman was killed in a helicopter accident. It was hovering too long in one place ignoring the prevailing wind conditions. The note accompanying news of Yoshiaki Misawa's death observed that there was concern at the risks being incurred because of the competition among Japanese tv channels. That concern must ring a bell of recognition among all of us here tonight.

While this occasion tonight is dedicated to freelance news cameramen and women, it is as well to remember that in the business of international news gathering, all journalists, regardless of category are at risk. We are all in this together whether we carry a camera or a microphone or a notebook. Only last week the "Times" reported that the number of journalists murdered in the Americas over the last 7 years now stood at 155. Of those a staggering 62 were killed in Colombia, and in case we get too superior about the predictable awfulness of living in the world's first drugs state, then the murder of Veronica Guerin in Dublin should put any such complacency in its place.

Perhaps the country that is the most dangerous for journalists is Algeria. "Index on Censorship" - and what censorship can be more final or effective than murder - regularly begins its summaries about Algeria with the words: "The murder of journalists continues". And so they do. In one month alone recently, the following Algerian journalists were murdered: a weekly magazine writer; a head of foreign news; a reporter; a cartoonist for a government newspaper; a producer on a radio cultural programme; a transmitter technician; and a tv journalist - and his wife.

Why does anyone take such risks? As Martin Bell has observed: "War reporting is a daft way to earn a living. But it provides the survivors with a privileged view of history in the making as well as a chance to contribute to its first draft, which is the news". That is fair as far as it goes. But it would make a very wayward first draft of history. I would not want as a historian to rely on the historical record as bequeathed by the tv news bulletins. Looking for newsreel footage of the days when the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961, it turned out that there was none. I don't know where the cameras were on those days but they appear not to have been at the scene of the event.

Where too is all the footage shot but never screened? Where is the footage shot but rejected on the grounds that the scenes involved - and Bosnia and Rwanda yielded plenty - were too horrific. Have we become too squeamish in our presentation of the reality of brutal wars? Mass murders, attacks on civilians cannot adequately be represented in a symbolic, vestigial form. Bloodstains on the ground or a small crater are wholly inadequate substitutes for the actuality of multiple killings. It is an evasion to say that they are and a misuse of the bravery of camera crews and journalists, whether freelance or not, to say that they are. We must avoid a pornography of violence, where networks start to compete with one another in the amount of gore that they show. But when some viewers complain about violence on the news, when it is an essential part of the knowledge needed to assess what is happening, I believe the only answer to the complainants is to say :"I'm sorry - we will not censor the ghastly realit y, for that is the only way that you the voters, the citizens, can be properly informed about the world around us".

Is there not a mismatch between our comparative tolerance about violence as an essential component of tv entertainment, and our restraint and constraints in presenting the violence of the world around us?

I would in any case like to see a regular programme where a journalist who has followed a running crisis or a war on a daily basis is allowed to put together a documentary based on all the material they gathered at the time. That would allow a treatment of the subject that included immediacy as well as reflection. It would also tell us a great deal about the business of war reporting, of what is left out as well as what is put in.

Or should we call it the theatre of war reporting? The ordinary viewer sees the reporter standing up in some wartorn location and marvels - correctly - at the risks involved in getting those pictures. Sometimes they are accompanied by claims that this footage is the only footage of the event in question. Yet is this quite the entire picture? Martin Bell again describes a situation above Grbavica where UN observers are counting the incoming Serb gunfire :

" We are shooting the explosions. They are counting them. I have never enjoyed a better view of a war zone except perhaps once on the Golan Heights. But a nagging voice inside me wonders what is the use of any of it? Are we not all battlefield voyeurs of one sort or another? Making a living out of other people's troubles? Even war profiteers? And when the tv cameras are ranged three deep like birds of prey along snipers' alley are not those who put them there expecting - hoping even - for the sharpshooters opposite to return to their deadly business?"

That is not a scene we are ever allowed to see. The viewer would never guess that the loneliness of the lonely stand-upper is often a fiction only. Turn the viewfinder a few degrees in the other direction, and what would you see - other correspondents doing exactly the same thing. Now, that is part of the necessary myth of all journalism - that we alone saw this, reported that, thought the other. If we didn't believe that we were not contributing something personal and special, then we would not be in the business at all.

But this raises an uncomfortable question for you the freelance cameramen and the organisations that ultimately employ you. Why is there not more pooling? Of course there often is, but the essence of your trade is that you are expected to deliver the exclusive when the staff pool is in operation. Is this right? If, as some correspondents believe, pooling saves lives, then why are we putting lives at risk? If the big broadcasting organisations will no longer risk their staffers' lives in the real war hell holes, if insurers will no longer insure those who go into those hell holes, whose lives are put at risk to get the really dangerous images that we all crave? The process involved here represents a privatisation of risk, shoving off danger from those for whom we are directly responsible to those of whom we can wash our hands.

Noone is forced to be a frontline camera journalist. But I feel a sense of queasiness at the way in which we contract out that risk even to those who willingly take it as their chosen way of life. Have we got the balance right . Somehow I doubt it.

All international news organisations behave in this way. All audiences expect to see the best images of the events around them. All viewers love a scoop, an exclusive. But the armchair satisfaction of taking part in the vicarious thrill of flinching as Kate Adie flinched as a bullet flew inches past her head must not be bought at such a high price.

For the world of front line news gathering is not only getting more expensive, it is getting more dangerous. Those involved in wars under the laughable and tragic new world disorder know nothing and care less about the fourth estate, or freedom of communication or of non-combatants. The benign conventions under which civilians and correspondents were not part of the field of battle are long gone. How much risk is it right to run in order to recover accounts of violence in such wars?

In his review of Johanna Neuman's book "Lights, Camera, War", Sir David Hannay- now the government's special representative for Cyprus writes:

"How is one to guard against the manipulation of the news and the images by a totalitarian regime? How, in a world where relentless cost pressures are resulting in there being fewer and fewer correspondents with genuine, in-depth knowledge of the background to a crisis or a tragedy, can the necessary historical and analytical perspective be supplied alongside the images of horror? How can the media avoid becoming an actor, even a participant, in the unfolding events it is merely trying to record? Is there a case for attempting to re-establish the fast disappearing line between reporting and comment ?"

Last year, I had the privilege of working with Nigel Bateson of the BBC, in the unthreatening circumstances of Hiroshima and Tokyo during the fiftieth anniversaries of the end of the Pacific War. Nigel was being given a well deserved break from years of covering Bosnia. During a particularly hairy journey in Bosnia, Nigel delivered himself of this observation:

"I'm too young to die. I still have fish to catch and babies to make". You, no doubt, would echo that sentiment in your own particular terms. It is the only kind of attitude to adopt in your profession, the profession of survival.