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BACK TO : WAR & CRISIS REPORTING
How to succeed as a war correspondent by Jeremy Bowen 
2002 Rolls Royce Lecture at Cardiff U Jeremy Bowen, BBC war correspondent and presenter I joined the BBC after I finished university and worked first in radio. In 1987 they started up a specialist foreign affairs unit and I got a job in it and had a great eight years working out of London, doing basically every story that came up. One of the most memorable was probably the Gulf War in 1991 when I was in Baghdad as it was being bombed. John Simpson did the first couple of days, then he got ill and was kicked out. So I came in and did the other couple of months. Before we speak about September 11, or 9/11 as the Americans call it, I thought I'd talk a bit about how to become a successful journalist. The first thing is that you've got to develop good habits so that when you're under pressure you do the right things without thinking about them. The second is to go on placements. I remember that when I was a trainee the home news editor Jack Reagan came to do a lecture. We had a lot of lectures from BBC grandees, some of whom weren't very good because they spent lunchtime in the pub so they'd just wooze their way in. But he was very serious. He looked around us trainees and said, 'Well, I suppose you want to be reporters. Change your minds: there are almost no jobs, and you won't get the jobs. Get another kind of job because I'm telling you now it's not going to happen. People come to me looking for shifts, I don't give them shifts.' Well, I thought, that was very encouraging. Then someone else said, 'You've got to knock on doors. Go on placements, in any paper or news organisation.' One of the important things about being a journalist, particularly if you want to be a reporter, is that you have to have fairly thick skin. Another is that, when the opportunity comes to impress, you can make the key breakthrough quite quickly. And how do you do it, how do you get to that point where the breaks come that you can exploit? Well, first of all, get your training. Do all the basic things. If you do them right, then you'll do well. I'll give you a couple of examples. I was working as a television reporter in London on the night of the BBC television news Christmas party, held in the canteen at Television Centre. I turned up keen for a good Christmas party. It was a damp squib to start with, like a funeral, and I was sneaking away when at that moment one of the producers from the newsroom comes tearing down the corridor. 'Haven't you heard?' he said. A jumbo jet had crashed in Scotland. It was the Lockerbie crash, in 1988. I wasn't working that day, but I went up to the newsroom and Chris Cramer, who was one of the big cheeses in news at the time and is now president of CNN International, saw me and said, 'What are you doing here? Get to Lockerbie.' I was reminded then of something that one of the reporters who spoke to us trainees said about his important break, which for him was the Brighton bomb in the early '80s. He said, 'The first thing I did when they called me in the middle of the night was took a shower and had some bacon to eat.' I didn't have a wife to make me my bacon but I went home and I got a proper coat, proper boots, stuff like that, which I was really, really thankful for, over the next 19 days. As for the shower thing, when I was a Middle East correspondent, whenever the phone rang, first thing in the morning to tell me to go out to something, I'd always, especially being a TV reporter, have a shower and sort myself out. It takes a few minutes, gives you time to think and by three o'clock in the afternoon everybody's much more happy you did that. So I found my way up to Lockerbie. I raced up the motorway, stopped to fill up the tank somewhere near Carlisle, looked round and saw there was someone else frantically scrabbling around trying to fill up. It was Jennie Bond, who's now the royal correspondent. She was a news desk reporter at the time and she looked at me and growled and I looked at her and growled, and we got back into our cars and belted up the motorway. It was like a war zone up there, whole streets on fire and bits of plane all over the main street. Little bits of twisted metal. Luckily I did the one o'clock news the next day, and fortunately I did it alright and they kept me with the story. So I did the packages on that story then and stayed there over Christmas. It was a very important breakthrough for me. The only other big breakthrough for me was being in Baghdad during the Gulf War. I had in fact fallen somewhat out of favour of a slight change of management and I was distraught because at the beginning of the war I wasn't in the starting line up there. They sent me off on a poxy tour of the Gulf with Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, which was my so-called consolation prize for not being with one of the British units or in the desert in Saudi Arabia. I'd been involved in the coverage up to then so I was really distraught. And when the war started they sent me to New York, to sit there basically. Then they kicked the people out of Baghdad who had been there. John Simpson had been there for six months waiting for this moment and then after two nights, I think, they kicked them out. He got back to Amman, Jordan, and he was ill and everybody else was tied up, so they had to get me. The biggest story of my time in Baghdad during the Gulf War was the attack on the Al Amiriya shelter, where hundreds of civilians were killed. It was very controversial because the Pentagon and Ministry of Defence said it was a command centre. We heard that morning that they'd hit a shelter and so went in a convoy of cars down to that part of Baghdad. It was quite a nice middle class area and there was now smoke coming out of a concrete building, a lorry backed up at the side of it, and people pulling bodies out, dozens and dozens of bodies in terrible states of mutilation, some of them. They had been burnt, but I had a good look and I could see that they were women, children and old men. There was no one there in uniforms, and there were a lot of people outside, mainly male, who said the same thing as I could see. It seemed to be a straightforward news story. There was a shelter, it had been hit, and I guessed it was probably a mistake of some sort. It was clearly a precision guided missile of some description that did this. In fact I learnt afterwards that it was two, one that made the hole in the concrete, and then another one that went in the hole and incinerated everyone inside-it was a very clever weapon. Not only had I been to the shelter, I had also been to the morgue where they had been taking the bodies. There were bodies in the back, bodies unloaded in the truck in the yard, in the morgue, bodies throughout the courtyard of the mortuary. So I had a good look at it and to my amazement when I was live, on one of the precursors of News 24 (that was the first time the BBC had gone in to try to do rolling television news over a period of days), Peter Sissons starts with this amazingly hostile line of questioning: 'How do you know this? The Pentagon has said very directly and explicitly that that was a command centre.' I was quite taken aback. I wasn't that experienced and in no sense fully-fledged, if you're ever fully-fledged. I just said, 'Look, all I can report on is what I've seen with my own eyes and it's this,' and thank God, because if I had screwed that one up I wouldn't be standing here today. It went OK. There was fierce questioning and a lot of disinformation campaigning, which I didn't know about at the time but found later led to some really vicious stuff in the newspapers, one article comparing me to Lord Haw Haw who had broadcast from Berlin during the war. I got a substantial sum of libel damages out of that. That was the Daily Star, and helped me buy a house, as a matter of fact, which I still live in. What I'm saying is everybody at some point gets the big break. Take it with both hands, but the key thing is don't mess it up. Know the basics well. I want to talk now more in relation to September 11, looking at some ethical issues that I came across in my time as a foreign correspondent. The first one is intrusion. For years the main thing I did was go to wars, disasters, earthquakes, revolutions. It was a fantastic job and I loved every minute of it and I miss it a lot, but it became very clear to me after a while that a really good day for us is probably the worst day or the last day of life for somebody who we're dealing with. How many times have I been to visit families when half their kids have been slaughtered? How many times have I filmed people when they have been standing next to the bodies of their families who have been slaughtered, with blood still coming out of them? It is desperately, desperately intrusive-and at times it's even more intrusive than that. One of the best cameramen who the BBC have is a guy called Darren Conway-DC he's known as-an Australian guy. He's in his early 30s and is a fantastic cameraman. He works a lot in Singapore with Matt Frei, the Asia correspondent. How does he get those images? I have to say sometimes in a really intrusive way. He's a sensitive person and he talks to people and strokes their arms, but what his camera is doing is intrusive. He has a wide-angle adapter on it that means he can get in very close to faces and you can see every wrinkle. He holds the camera there while we're talking to someone and sometimes for a minute or two minutes you see a whole range of expression and at the end, very often, they settle into what is a very authentic expression. But when I first saw him doing it, it looked brutal. Having said that, people who are at those terrible moments probably have so many things on their minds that they don't notice. But that's no excuse, no ethical justification for such a degree of intrusion into their lives. There's only one real justification for it and that's being a witness. The reporting I used to do around the world in trouble spots is letting people know what's happening in the world. It's a fundamental human right, I think. At times BBC news sanitises itself, out of various concerns about taste and decency, for example after the Dunblane shootings. All the news organisations after a day or two pulled out of the town in deference to the finer feeling of the people involved. We would never do that if we were dealing with black people abroad or even white people abroad. Far from it; we'd be into houses finding what was going on. Is there a difference between what you do at home and what you do abroad? I don't think there should be myself. Equally, if you're covering war sometimes that means showing bodies-not the whole time, because the impact would diminish, but you have to. During a very mealy-mouthed period at the BBC, about 10 or 12 years ago, I had to go and cover a cyclone in Bangladesh. At first, there were 25,000 dead and we didn't go. When there were 50,000 dead, we didn't go, and when it got to 75,000 we started thinking about it. I wanted to go when there were 25,000. I just thought it was mind-blowing. Imagine if there were 25,000 dead in France. The foreign editor was keen but various other people weren't. Overnight it went to estimates of 125,000. I was about to go on holiday somewhere and going to Heathrow heard on the radio that it was up to 125,000, so I rang the foreign desk and said, 'Do you want me to go now?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, thank God, I've been trying to get hold of you.' These were the days before people had mobile phones. It was only when it got to 125,000 that we went and then I had to cover the story not showing any bodies. The whole point of going was the fact that over 125,000 people were dead and we couldn't show one body in the reporting of it. Very difficult and also a knock at journalism. Let me just talk briefly about how the job has changed. The big difference now is 24-hour news. When we were in Bosnia, for example, my job was to go out in the morning with the camera crew and come back, maybe at lunchtime but probably by the evening, with a story which would be worth showing on the evening news. The life of many BBC journalists, reporters especially, is very different now, mainly because of 24-hour news. They're chained to satellite dishes on roofs of hotels and may go around the world just seeing roofs of hotels. Fortunately people like Richard Sambrook, BBC's head of news, are aware of the dangers and the difficulties. But one of the reporters who was covering the Afghan business spoke of how disgusted she was the schedule. When it was her turn to do the live day, she'd get up, log onto her computer, look at the wire services, print out a few things, read it, digest it and go up on the roof and then someone like me in London would say, well, what's going on in Afghanistan now-another heavy night of bombing. Over now to our correspondent in Northern Afghanistan and I'd say, 'Americans are saying that they flew another 24 bombing raids last night'-and the correspondent would say, 'That's right, and the main areas of concentration were Kandahar and Kabul military targets.' Of course this is not journalism. Martin Bell described it as performance. And they are aware of that and don't like it. I said this, in fact, to Sambrook at the time and he said, 'No, I agree with you, it's rubbish. I think we should just pull them out rather than do that stuff.' But then the dam broke and they all moved down towards Kabul and actually had something to report. The key thing about being live is you've got to have something to talk about and the only way I think you can really legitimately do that is if you're talking about something you've seen yourself. The correspondents did try to get around it by doing turn and turn about-one day on the roof then one day trying to do a package. But it's quite difficult. We do too much live for the sake of it, and it's a danger to the standards of BBC journalism. There have been huge technological changes. We used to communicate at the foreign desk by telexes little more than 10 years ago. If you were in Afghanistan, and I went to it a lot at that particular time, there were no telephones. By some strange miracle, we could get pictures out of the TV station but to communicate we used to telex. An old machine in the basement of a building. It's a very strange feeling when you're in some lonely place and you find a telex machine and tap in about a 7 digit number and just sit there waiting and then, 'du du du,' you get an answer back. It's like you are a drowning man being handed a branch, sometimes, getting that answer back. Now you just get your zap phone out-tiny little things you put on the roof of you car-and you can call the office, call home. In those days we'd go off to places and say to the management, 'Look, you're not going to hear from me for three days, but it'll be fine and we'll get back.' Now, you have to go live every hour. How can you do it? The way to get around it is by having some people doing one thing and some people doing another, but it's still unsatisfactory to my mind. The bottom line for the journalist is that you've just got to get it right, because whatever they think about your producing, about the programme that you've done, or the article that you've written, if you get it right then they can say nothing to you. They may say, I don't like your style, I don't like the way you did it, but if you get your journalism correct, then they've got nothing on you. Your home free, everything's fine. |
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