The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings. Robert Fisk
same old grey streets shimmering through the glass, I opened the Chronicle. Nothing had changed. All that follows came from one single issue. ‘Bosses leading a management buyout of stricken shipyard Cammell Laird say a £2 m damages claim from former workers could scupper the bid.’ Key words: Bosses. Stricken. Scupper. Bid. ‘A pair of high-flyers will be winging their way to France for the most gruelling cycle race in the world.’ Key words: High-flyers. Gruelling. ‘A mum of three who lured a teenage girl babysitter into a seedy sex session with a stranger she met through an internet chatroom has failed in her bid to cut her jail term.’ Lured. Seedy. Bid. ‘Jetaway MPs have been condemned for heading off on foreign jaunts rather than holidaying in the North-east to help the region’s ailing tourist industry.’ Sympathetic though I was to the MPs as I glanced at the weather grizzling down outside my car, I got the message: Jet-away. Jaunts. Ailing. ‘Police hunting the murderer of Sara Cameron have spread their net abroad.’ Yes, almost forty years since I’d been writing this crap, the cops were still ‘spreading their net’ and – I had little doubt – would soon be ‘narrowing their search’ or ‘stepping up’ their hunt for Sara’s killer. It was left to the successor of the old weekly Blyth News – now a free-sheet with the immortal title of the News Post Leader – to tell me that ‘plans to build a housing estate on scrubland in Blyth Valley have been put on ice…’
I drove to Morpeth to see the old magistrates court, and Gateshead, and back and forth over the Tyne bridges where I once had my picture taken in a waistcoat, and I found that the Rumbling Tum was now part of an underground bus station, that the slag-heaps had been largely ‘greened’, that the smoke had gone. Yes, that great, greasy, wet smoke that I breathed day and night – even in my unheated bedroom – had vanished. Perhaps smokeless coal and gas has its advantages. Or, as I grimly thought, perhaps there’s nothing left to burn.
Jim Harland was leaning over his front wall when I drove up. Plumper, a little jowled, eyes sharp as coals, Sean Connery features still in evidence, along with his tongue. ‘You’re the man who missed the story in Blyth port on your day off,’ he growled. The sun had come out. He had set up the annual town fair and today – deus ex machina – was town fair day. There was a fire engine and pin-bowling and pop-singing and dancing by a team of overweight cuties in old US army uniforms – I’m still puzzling the meaning of that one – and a ball-in-the-tub throwing session (which Fisk lost) and an awful lot of very tough-looking mums and dads with sallow faces and sad smiles and, I thought, a life of great hardship behind them. Blyth, Harland told me, was becoming a great dormitory town for Newcastle. Pity they’d torn up the railway. But the sleeping bit I could well understand.
Harland is a big man, ‘Big Jim Harland’ we used to call him – he went on in later years to work for the Mirror, then the BBC – and he propelled me towards the Federation Club where pints moved like quicksilver around a room where huge ex-miners and ex-shipyard men kept winning all kinds of bingo games. I had never seen so many £5 notes. Life had been good to Harland and his wife Rosemary and we walked back to his home – just across from my old ‘digs’ – for lunch. ‘Space was the problem for us in journalism, Bob,’ he said. ‘I was taught at sixteen that you had to economise on space. We couldn’t write “Mrs S, who was 23 years old”, I had to write “23-yearold Mrs S”. But if we said what we thought, well, we’d have called that bias. We could say “this is what I saw” but not “this is what I feel I saw”. The journalists who trained us were regional journalists – and they taught us what they knew, the way they had been trained.’
But slowly, as Rosemary made the lunch in the kitchen, Harland revealed more about Blyth. He thought Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill had done most harm to the town. But he knew much that I had not known when I worked there. The town clerk who had been such a classical scholar – he had lived near my digs but was now long dead – had been on the make. The police chief – the man who was the target of the gay man in the court but now also dead – had been in the habit of ringing up landlords in the early hours of the morning for a drink, forcing them to open their pubs at 6 a.m. for the local, newly off-duty, cops. ‘No, we didn’t write this,’ Harland said. ‘These people fed us. They’d help us. The policeman who’d want an early morning drink would also tip us off on stories. We had to talk to everyone, the town clerk, the police, the fire brigade… Then there was child abuse. There was a lot of it here. A terrible thing. But the social services wouldn’t talk to us. They said all their enquiries were confidential, that we didn’t have the right to know what they had learnt. And so child abuse went on. I only realised the state of things when a cricketer I knew made a comment about his daughters and I realised it was a common thing. But we accept the “privacy” of the social services. And in court, we reported “indecency with a minor”. Those were the words we used.’
I asked about the Middle East. Did Harland think that perhaps our ‘training’ had caused us to fail when we journalists were faced not with local government disputes or coroners’ courts but with a great historical tragedy? ‘I’ve never covered a story that was a great tragedy like the Middle East,’ he said. ‘I can see the problem, yes. How do you make the journalism here stretch to the journalism there?’ He had made the point precisely.
For out in the Middle East, more and more journalists, each with their local reporting experience, their ‘training’, their journalism schools – the American version even more banal than the English ones – are using clichés and tired adjectives to obscure reality. Turn on your television tonight or read tomorrow’s agency reports and we are told of the ‘cycle of violence’ – no side taken there – of ‘clashes’ (in which the identities of victim and killer are obscured) or of ‘the fears of Israeli security chiefs’. Note how the word ‘security’ is always linked to the word ‘Israel’. And how ‘chiefs’ has made the grade from Blyth to Palestine. And just as the police chief in Blyth would tip us off on a story, so Israelis – to a much lesser extent Palestinians – tip us off on stories. No one wants to rock the boat, to be controversial. Why write about the Blyth staithes if we’re going to carry a Coal Board denial? Why write about the outrageous nature of Israel’s killing of stone-throwing children if we’re going to get outraged letters to the editor?
Much better to stick to clichés. Arab ‘terrorists’ threaten Israel. Israeli ‘security chiefs’ warn Arafat. Can Arafat ‘control’ his own people, we asked when the Israelis asked the same question. Yet when a Jewish settlers’ group killed two Palestinian civilian men and a baby, we did not ask if Sharon could control his own people. Since the Palestinians had not asked that question, we did not ask it. We were silent that time round. Over five days in the North-east and on the long drive back to London, I listened to the radio news. Two Israelis had been killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber at Binyamina. The Israelis ‘struck back’ at the Palestinians, killing four guerrillas in a ‘targeted’ killing. ‘Targeted’ was Israel’s word. In other words, death squads. But that wasn’t what the BBC said. When the Israeli settlers murdered the three Palestinians – including the baby – the Israeli police were reported as ‘narrowing their search’ for the killers.
Never the why. Only the what. We reported the closure of Blyth’s mines. But we rarely asked why the mines had to die. We watched Blyth decay. We reported its death. In my cub reporter days, we watched its last moments as a coal-and-ship city. But we didn’t scratch the black, caked soot off the walls of Newcastle and ask why Britain’s prime ministers allowed the centre of the Industrial Revolution to go to the grave. Harland agreed that there was a culture of ‘accepting’ authority. We didn’t challenge the police or the council – or the social services. They may not have been our friends. But we needed them. We respected them, in an odd sort of way. They were the ‘chiefs’, the ‘bosses’. And now we rarely challenge friendly governments. We can (and should) attack Arafat’s corrupt dictatorship in Palestine. But Israeli wrongdoing has to be ‘balanced’ with quotations from Israel’s ‘security chiefs’. The off-the-record briefing from the council clerk or the police chief has become the off-the-record briefing from the Foreign Office. Look how we responded to Nato’s wartime Kosovo briefings. How we accepted. How we parroted the words.
I’m glad the Chron exists. It was good to me. So was Big Jim Harland. He made me understand the need for accuracy.