TRUE VALUE OF JOURNALISM
As we mourn the death of reporter Lyra McKee, murdered while out covering riots in Derry, a reminder to those in power that they need to start supporting what we do – or face appalling social consequences
POLITICIANS don’t much like journalists. In public, they tend to pay lip service to the notion of supporting a free press and believing in journalism, but get them alone and usually the first thing they’ll do is complain about something or other that a journalist said or wrote about them at some point in the (often distant) past.
They don’t like the fact that we question everything they say, rather than accepting it all at face value. They don’t like the fact that we’re suspicious of both their actions and their motives. They don’t like the fact that they can’t tell us what to do.
There are, as always in life, a few exceptions. I know that the Finance Minister, Paschal Donohoe, has a deep respect for journalists and the work they do. He has recognised the crisis in public service journalism, and understands that a world without journalists would be a very dangerous place indeed; that’s why he agreed not to hike the VAT rates on newspapers in the last budget, and actually to reduce the VAT on digital journalism products. He – and a few others – see clearly that in a world without journalists, there are no filters and checks on untruth.
Take the widespread scaremongering over the HPV vaccine, for example, where a small group of people were able to use social media to spread entirely false claims about the safety of the lifesaving jab. It took a lot of hard work by proper journalists – including at this newspaper – to point out to the public that every international study ever conducted, including several under the auspices of the World Health Organisation, had shown that the HPV vaccine is as safe as just about any piece of medication ever created… and of course it also saves lives.
If it wasn’t for journalists, we wouldn’t know about the financial shenanigans of the FAI… even though the politicians have themselves privately admitted for years that the governing body of Irish soccer was not subject to proper scrutiny. If it wasn’t for journalists, we’d never have had the tribunals which – armed with legal powers far in excess of what’s available to any reporter – were finally able to prove for a fact what the media had long been suggesting about the corruption that ran rampant through the highest levels of our political establishment.
IF it wasn’t for this newspaper’s efforts, we wouldn’t be getting an Online Safety Commissioner to help protect our society – and in particular our children – against the unregulated and unrestrained excesses of the social media giants.
Journalists are the ultimate check against the excesses of the powerful and the tyrannies of the rich. As Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the Unites States of America, put it: ‘The only security of all is in a free press… were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.’
And yet still, most politicians don’t like journalists. You only need to remember the words of our Taoiseach, speaking last year, when he said he sympathised with Donald Trump’s view that the media were ‘the enemy of the people’. Look at the abject refusal of our Government to support a viable funding model for the State broadcaster. Or take the curmudgeonly reluctance of the political establishment to reform our antiquated and repressive defamation laws, which do nothing to protect ordinary citizens but are a godsend for the rich and powerful who want to silence questioning and stifle dissent. (By way of example: in 2010, my newspaper was sued by the FAI over a suggestion from former minister
Ivan Yates that its finances were less than 100% transparent, or that it might be facing financial difficulties into the future. Our lawyers warned that, based on Irish defamation law, fighting the case could see us financially ruined, and so we settled. And then look at what we have learned in the last few weeks. Is that really what our defamation laws are there to do?)
Part of the problem is that politicians don’t really understand the risks that journalists face. Chief among them on a day-today basis is the risk of financial ruin. For all that our TDs and senators may moan about what’s written, we have to be extremely careful with every word we print. We employ full-time lawyers to try to ensure that what we publish or broadcast complies with both the law, and the provisions of the various regulators that govern the media industry. We do everything we can, within limited budgets, to check and double-check what we write so as to ensure it’s not just accurate, but also fair.
THE politicians also don’t appreciate the resistance we face in seeking and obtaining information: the blocking, the deception, and sometimes outright lying by those we seek to hold to account.
Yesterday, for example, it was revealed that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had flat-out lied when she explained why President Trump had fired the head of the FBI. Ms Sanders simply invented a series of fictitious conversations with members of the FBI in order to
justify the decision, when in fact no such discussions had taken place. Alastair Campbell, a man still widely given a platform here to discuss politics, was responsible for the notorious ‘dodgy dossier’ which helped create a justification for the invasion of Iraq; not only do we now know that claims about Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were utterly untrue, we can all see the devastation and death that an illegal war – based entirely on lies – has wrought throughout the Middle East.
And politicians definitely don’t appreciate the fact that journalists routinely put themselves in actual physical danger too. Take, for example, the recent brilliant reporting from Syria by Irish Mail on Sunday correspondent Norma Costello – who, along with other
great scoops – brought us the exclusive interview with Irish ‘Isis bride’ Lisa Smith. I don’t think that our political classes consider for one second just how dangerous it is to operate as a foreign correspondent, trying to tell the world the truth about what’s happening in some of the most dangerous places on the planet.
When politicians go to war zones, they go in heavily armed convoys to places that have already been deemed safe; when reporters go to war zones, they go into the heart of the fighting… with body armour and a mobile phone. I could tell the politicians about my friend Anna Blundy’s father David – himself a friend of my grandfather’s – who was shot dead by a sniper while reporting in El Salvador; or my former Sunday Times colleague Marie Colvin, killed while covering the plight of refugees in Syria; or any number of friends who still face death on an almost daily basis as they report from war zones across the world.
But of course you don’t have to be working abroad as a journalist to put yourself in danger.
Yesterday morning, the global journalistic community was left shattered and outraged by the murder on Thursday night of Lyra McKee at the scene of rioting in Derry. The fact that this appalling act took place on our island, in a city just a few hours’ drive from the one where I write this, only serves to accentuate the horror, disgust and shame that we all feel. I’m not going to pretend that I knew Lyra McKee, nor am I going to get into the ‘politics’ of this murder. Shooting dead an unarmed woman who was there to try to tell the truth tells you everything you need to know about those responsible.
WHAT I will say, though, is that this appalling act should serve as a wake-up call to those politicians who still don’t see how important it is to start the job of protecting journalism. I don’t expect them to offer round-the-clock security for reporters working in conflict zones, but I would ask them to start understanding what it is that we as a community do, and its true value to society. Not many of us journalists put ourselves at
daily physical risk in the way that someone like Lyra McKee did, but this is about more than just protecting our physical safety. This is about valuing, on a fundamental level, the job that we do. Whether it’s reporting from the frontline in a war zone or just asking difficult questions about government policy, whether you’re covering riots or reporting on the trolley crisis, the workings of a democratic society need people who will do so on behalf of the public.
The unfortunate truth is that too many of our politicians and leaders seem to believe the words of American satirist HL Mencken, who said that ‘the relationship between a journalist and a politician is the same as that between a dog and a lamp-post’. They think we exist to make their lives difficult or even unpleasant. But that’s simply not the case.
Yes, we question, we harry and we disbelieve; but ultimately we do so in order to try to get to what we believe to be the truth. If they’re going to listen to American writers, they should turn again to Thomas Jefferson. For even though Jefferson himself often railed through his career at some of the things that were written about him, he also understood just how critical it was to ensure that journalism could be conducted without fear. ‘Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press,’ he wrote, ‘nor can that be limited without danger of losing it.’
It’s well past time that our politicians started putting those words into action.