EVEN a cursory look at the international news headlines right now provides a stark reminder of the volatile world in which we live. The US is talking tough on North Korea, Qatar is bearing the brunt of restrictions imposed by some of its Middle East neighbours with unpredictable consequences, Venezuela is in meltdown and the battle to oust the Islamic State (IS) group from the cities of Mosul and Raqaa is reaching its zenith.
If ever there was a time for solid, first-hand eyewitness reporting from such places, it’s now. For those of us in the business of foreign reporting the past few years have been difficult times. Financial cutbacks at major news organisations have meant that the halcyon days of having correspondents dotted around the world have long since passed. Foreign news coverage is deemed to be prohibitively expensive, even if many of those making such decisions have rarely sat down and worked out what it really costs financially as well as in terms of undermining solid journalism and short-changing the public.
Just as the need to know more about what is happening in far-flung places has never been greater, so our journalistic capacity to deliver foreign content has sometimes been undermined by short-sighted editorial managers clearly out of touch with the wants and needs of news consumers.
By and large my own experience suggests that rather than have less foreign coverage in their broadcast or newsprint reports, people remain passionately interested in what is going on in secretive Pyongyang or turbulent Damascus.
There is good practical sense in this thinking too, given that we ignore what happens in other places at our peril.
In recent years some of the biggest threats to peace and stability have begun in remote outposts but then quickly turned up on our doorsteps, Islamist-inspired terrorism being the obvious example.
Speaking yesterday for the first time since publishing his report a year ago, Sir John Chilcot reminded us yet again that Tony Blair overstated the threat posed by Iraq leader Saddam Hussein and that the decision to go to war there was based on beliefs rather than facts. Mr Blair, he said, was not “straight with the nation”.
Mr Blair was not the first nor will he be the last political leader to play fast and loose with countless people’s lives while being economic with the truth.
I’ve always subscribed to the school of thought that journalists have a moral obligation to distinguish between good and evil in conflict zones, and if necessary to take sides. There is no shortage of historical precedents in this respect.
Think of Claude Cockburn’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, John Pilger and Wilfred Burchett’s coverage of the Vietnam conflict or the newspaper editor and anti-apartheid activist Donald Woods and you will understand what I mean.
It was the BBC’s veteran Middle East correspondent, Jim Muir, who once referred to the globetrotting fraternity of international correspondents as a “transnational tribe”.
While the ranks of that tribe might have been drastically reduced over recent years because of cutbacks, their role remains more vital than ever in ensuring that as many of us as possible are made aware of what is going on overseas.
Not only do correspondents bear witness and bring home truths, but act as one of our first lines of political defence. They remain one of the few bulwarks available against the disinformation on which half-baked or cynically orchestrated military and foreign policy adventures are based.
As we know all too well from recent history, the price of such escapades is frequently paid for by the lives of countless people over many years, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. As my late colleague Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times put it before sadly being killed while covering the war in Syria, the job of the correspondent is about trying to find truths in a “sandstorm of propaganda, when armies, tribes or terrorists clash”.
Today the density of that propaganda sandstorm is unprecedented. It might have been re-dubbed “fake news” but lies will alway be just that, lies.
The bottom line here is that the challenges facing international news coverage and those responsible for its delivery are perhaps greater than at any point since the Second World War.
The unparalleled problems as well as the potential brought by new technology and social media have sent the industry into a tailspin. Oddly enough, far from being pessimistic, I remain convinced that journalism will work its way through its current identity crisis. Instead of presiding over the wake of foreign reporting, the industry needs to focus on what it does well and can do even better.
Yesterday at the Scottish Parliament I had the privilege of speaking at the Future News Worldwide conference, a partnership programme between the British Council and some of the world’s leading media organisations.
For two days of intensive learning some 100 student journalists from 43 countries across the world have come together. This is a unique opportunity for these young talents to share experiences and explore the changing ways news is delivered. To say that such forums are invaluable would be a gross understatement. This is precisely the time when we need to look at how reporting will be done in the years ahead.
On one level the youngsters I met yesterday are future reporters with a skillset far removed from my own generation. They are the Facebook, Twitter, online, multimedia generation totally at home in the digital age.
That is how it should be, given what we face globally right now. But what inspired me most was that along with such modern skills they also have a passion for and recognition of what really matters to the survival of good international and indeed any reporting, conviction.
At times in recent years, I have often despaired of where journalism and the role of the foreign correspondent is heading. The young up-and-coming journalists I met in Edinburgh, coming as they do from places as far apart as Indonesia and Croatia, are a welcome reminder that, with proper support and encouragement, the profession is still in good hands.
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