Preparatory Meeting
Palais du Luxembourg, Paris
Friday 20th and Saturday 21st April 2001

DEBATE: "Can the Media Serve Peace as Well as Truth?"
Personal Opinions: 1. Paddy Sherman | 2. Annabel McGoldrick

Paddy Sherman

1. Personal opinion by Paddy Sherman (former president of Southam Newspapers, Canada, and delegate of the International Press Institute) In a perfect world, when the pollster asked: "Should journalists promote peace?" most people would probably answer yes. In the real world, of vicious and violent local or regional wars, a journalist who wrote the absolute objective truth would doubtless be quickly assassinated. By both sides. You don't have to be what some would call a religious fanatic to believe that The Cause justifies wholesale death and destruction. God, after all, is on every side in every war. It was Queen Victoria who said of the battles in the Crimea against Russia: "The war is popular beyond belief." And when, in that war, the Light Brigade Cavalry suicidally charged the Russian cannon and were destroyed, the London Times correspondent wrote about "the pride and splendour of war."

In the last century and a half, most developed countries have gained their knowledge of war from war correspondents. What did they get? Professor J. Cutler Andrews gave one frightening answer in his book: The North Reports the (American) Civil War. He wrote: “Sensationalism and exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander, faked eye-witness accounts, and conjectures built on pure imagination cheapened much that passed in the North for news.”

The Times of London proudly noted that it was not just the chief recorder of the events of one war, but “counted itself among the protagonists.” Winston Churchill, who did write some remarkable dispatches on the Boer War, had trouble deciding whether he was soldier or journalist. He ignored a journalist who told him he had to choose between fighting the war and reporting it. But he did write something fundamental: “Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.”

In a sense that's what happened as war corresponding gradually improved, though enormous obstacles still face reporters on all battlefronts. Leaders did see, on their television screens, some of what was happening in Vietnam. They did read brave reports of unacceptable truth by reporters dealing with their own government, the virtuous side, and the war ended.

But I take it the question we are dealing with now is not just how journalism of the right sort might help end wars once they've started, but how they might prevent them from starting in the first place. And whether that can be done by simply telling the truth, as the courts say, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, or whether newspapers must send journalists into places of high and worsening tension to head off war as a kind of super-mediator.

One problem struck me forcibly when I spoke at a seminar in Vienna after the Berlin Wall came down. Suddenly papers were springing up everywhere in East European countries. Many of those writing them were young journalists who had helped topple oppressive governments. Bright people. Brave people. Well-educated men and women. They had the smell of battle and political blood in their nostrils.They found the change from warrior to mere wordsmith a tremendous philosophical struggle. Worse, the new approach was even boring, which may be harder for any journalist to cope with.

Vaclav Havel noted that after 40 years of bondage, it is impossible to know immediately what is the proper way to practise a free press. And it is important to remember that in many of the most troubled parts of the world variations of that bondage still exist. Getting what one might call journalists on a government-owned medium to write with even a modicum of what we call objectivity might itself be worth a Nobel Prize. Expecting them to oppose their own aggressive governments, and campaign for a loss of national face that might conceivably lead to peace would be a guarantee of martyrdom. Each would get only one possible shot at it. Though I probably should not use the word “shot” in this context because there might be a literal shot after it.

And then there is the question of what is the “truth” that we expect journalists to tell. The Oxford Dictionary makes it simple: “Quality, state of being true.” Of course. Then it adds: “Loyalty, accuracy, integrity, etc.” Loyalty? There's an out for the most despicable mouthpiece of a tyrannical government.

Vaclav Havel took a stab at it when after his years of courageous opposition he wrote: “I'm tired of playing the builder's role. I just want to do what every writer should do -- tell the truth.” And then he tried to define it: “The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why and how it is said.”

That's much better than the dictionary version. Presumably it must include allowing for the fact that one side's unshakeable truth is a religious story from a thousand years ago. Or that the other's is the festering fact that it was wrongly dealt with in a treaty of, say, 1643.

Yet it is hard to avoid the feeling, given the structural problems of the United Nations, that in some cases The Journalist and all he stands for might be the last, best slender hope for peace. Even a century and a half ago, W.M. Thackeray wrote romantically of the Fourth Estate, which, referring to the latest technology of the day, he quaintly called the Corporation of the Goosequill: “There she is -- the great engine -- she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world -- her courtiers on every road. Her officers walk along with armies and her envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets. They are ubiquitous.”

And that was long before television, that many-edged monster. It can show things exactly as they happen, sometimes, though the camera's skills can not only conceal a vacant or poisonous mind, sometimes, but also make it appear a highly attractive political option.

(As an aside I was in South Africa in 1994 as one of a group of international election observers. The big story was how astonishingly tranquil and free of violence the voting was. One idiot did set off a small bomb and do trivial damage to an airport wall. We were startled to see the breathless reporting by one network war correspondent. Most of our members called home to our respective countries over the next few days and the reaction everywhere was the same : “Oh thank God you escaped that violence.” It is not hard to imagine how, in many contexts, that kind of footage could inflame violence.)

Let us grant for the moment that this is true: that journalism is the brightest hope. Is it sometimes true? Is it universally true? How do we raise all readerships everywhere to the educational level and World Peace state of mind that they will believe, and understand in the same way, the writings of selected journalists with a mission to avoid war or end it?

In my view it might tend to become true, over a very long time and among a few highly-developed and worldly nations. But would such reports be equally accepted by, say, the Hutus and the Tutsis? Would Hamas and the Israelis instantly take at face value reports from a crusading 'peace journalist' and lay down their guns? If they didn't, would we expect their constituents to force them to?

Most practising journalists would say, even if regretfully, that there's not a chance. But I am sure those same journalists would like to think they could do something more constructive than write the contemporary version of “ the pride and splendour of war.”

I remember that when I was publisher of one Canadian daily, the managing editor told me he was off on the customary summer recruitment from the leading journalism schools. I suggested that this time he might also try the history schools. “Then,” I said, “instead of getting an excited story about a new development happening for the first time in history, we might get one saying it was the 24th time, but different from all the others in the following significant ways.” He was a bit shocked, and later told me lamely that they couldn't find anyone suitable.

However, I think some variation of that approach is not only the one most likely to find acceptance in some worthwhile news organisations, but one most likely to produce good results in the field. That's why I think the Media and Peace Institute is a hopeful first step in the right direction. If it does its job properly, a graduate covering a hot spot would bring to it a much broader context and perhaps a different mindset on potential issues, but also a wealth of information on how similar conflicts unfolded elsewhere, what peacemaking did or didn't do, and how to avoid inadvertently inflaming the situation.

It won't be easy. It won't be quick. And the people who write such pieces won't get any space in the clangorous tabloids or the incurably paranoid nationalistic press. What I would hope it might do is enlarge the small number of people already writing thoughtful, balanced and genuinely informed international assessments.

It might perhaps introduce such approaches to countries that have so far lacked them and, even better, have students from clashing countries studying together.That way the graduates would have a better chance of getting read by what Churchill called “modern men of light and leading”, so that the “simple folk” might see much less of war.