The best war reporting "takes sides", but the very future of this profession, and journalism in general, is now threatened by the concentration of media ownership in a few powerful hands. This was one of the main conclusions drawn by an international panel at the Cuirt Literary Festival debate in Galway at the weekend.
BBC journalists George Alagiah and Misha Glenny, Nobel Prize-winning author, Nadine Gordimer, and Derry author and activist, Eamonn McCann, had been invited to debate the theme,"War of Words" and the responsibilities of war reporting. The chairman was the Labour Party's foreign affairs spokesman and Galway West TD, Mr Michael D. Higgins, who stood in at short notice for Prof William Schabas of the Irish Centre for Human Rights when he was held up at Belfast airport by a security alert.
Mr Higgins threw down the gauntlet with observations on the creation of a "mind of war", which suggested the impossibility of peace and was related to undemocratic control of the media. It was, he noted, very appropriate to be having this debate at a time when war was being presented as a form of "light entertainment".
He posed a series of questions to the participants: was one a "tourist of tragedy" or a "voyeur" when one travelled to a conflict? Was neutrality impossible, and how did one remember the images? Were we all "victims of a single narrative", controlled by a particular economic structure?
Mr Alagiah said he was uncomfortable with the term "war correspondent", as there was a breed of journalist that covered conflicts for the "adrenalin rush". His experience had been one of a constant clash between the professional requirement to be impartial and the personal instinct to take sides. In his opinion the best journalism did "take sides", and the need for common values should be stressed over a false impression of "objectivity", which was, in effect, the agenda of the most powerful.
Mr Glenny, author of several books on the Balkans conflict and now working as a consultant to the Stability Pact for Reconstruction in South Eastern Europe, agreed that there were journalists who "got off" on war situations. Yugoslavia illustrated the danger of taking sides, simplifying a situation and creating a "hierarchy of victimhood", he added.
While Serbs had been demonised and blamed solely for the war, responsibility lay with an "elite" that involved both the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, and the Croatian president, the late Franjo Tudjman.
He also described his personal dilemma when witnessing journalists from the US and western Europe descending on his homeland "like bees around a honey pot", taking "the moral high ground" on a conflict they knew nothing about. In this sense, journalists could become a part of the conflict, he added.
Mr McCann quoted from the veteran US war journalist, Walter Cronkite, who had said that journalism , as distinct from journalists, was now in danger. He also noted with some irony that it had taken Larry Flint, owner of Hustler magazine, to challenge the US Defence Department's ban on sending US reporters with troops to Afghanistan.
Ms Gordimer observed that the written word was now being overtaken by the supremacy of the image. Immediate reporting by satellite television of conflict and death could never fully interpret the effect of catastrophic events on the human spirit, she said.
Nor could the pain experienced by the survivors, who were forced to come out with clichés in front of a camera or a microphone, be fully explained through such a medium.
The use and abuse of the word "terrorist", and the current state of reporting the Middle East conflict, were discussed by the panel, with Mr McCann noting that people would understand this war for what it was if the Israeli army was described as the army of occupation and Palestinians as resistance forces.
Mr Alagiah criticised the "pretence of objectivity", in referring to Palestine as the "occupied territories", while never stating who it was that was doing the occupying, as in the Israeli army.
The recent resignation of the Dutch government over its army's role in the Srebrenica massacre in the former Yugoslavia was applauded by Mr Glenny, who emphasised that the blame for this event lay with members of the United Nations Security Council for failing to back up the proposed safe havens.
While not wishing to demean in any way the fate of those who had died in the events of September 11th, he noted that more people had died in Srebrenica but "the world had not changed".
Mr McCann said that the consumer was not the helpless observer, and had a duty to become involved politically in the defence of public service broadcasting and other forms of "free speech".
