Journalists Find Little Neutrality Over Objective Reporting

Allan Little, a veteran foreign correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp., remembers the dread he felt in the summer of 1995 as ethnic Serb soldiers approached the Muslim town of Srebrenica. His editors called from London and asked what was going to happen. He predicted the worst, a massacre. “They will all die,” Little told his bosses over the phone.

But he did not go on the air and tell the world.

“I couldn’t say that on the radio or on television because I would be [considered] appallingly biased,” he said. “I would be demonizing the Serbs.”

After Srebrenica fell on July 11, 1995, between 2,700 to 7,000 Muslim men and boys were rounded up and slaughtered.

“Thus, we failed,” Little recently confessed to a hushed gathering of journalists, relief workers and academics at Boston’s Christian Science Center. “We failed because we weren’t clear enough about what was going on because we were frightened by the big stick of balance and objectivity and neutrality.

“I still to this day feel sullied and tainted that I pulled my punches on that one.”

At a time when the media’s credibility is reaching a new low, Little and other foreign correspondents are asking a provocative question: Are balance, neutrality and objectivity sacrosanct in today’s news? Should a journalist always balance both sides and remain a neutral conveyor belt to the news consumer?

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour told a USC journalism audience in Los Angeles late last year that neutrality is not acceptable in places like Bosnia where there is a clear aggressor.

“When you are neutral, you can become an accomplice and in these kinds of situations, you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes against humanity,” she said.

Such comments already have ignited criticism from such analysts as former CBS correspondent Marvin Kalb, now director of the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University. Kalb has suggested that the public is “shortchanged” when reporters become so involved in announcing a moral wrong that they end up affecting government policy.

Nik Gowing, main program presenter for the BBC’s World Service Television, took the criticism a step further. At the Boston meeting organized by the International Center for Humanitarian Reporting, Gowing characterized some of the strongly anti-Serb reporting in Bosnia as “a secret shame” for the journalism community.

“I think there is a cancer now which is affecting journalism,” Gowing said. “I think it is the unspoken issue of partiality and bias in foreign reporting.

“There is something rather taboo, or even heretic, I think, to talk about this in media circles, partly because to do so would undermine the perceived integrity and objectivity of correspondents who report from battle zones,” he added.

No reporter should back away from describing a genocide, suggested John Buckley, a supervising producer of Christian Science Monitor radio, “but far more worrisome is the possibility that if you allow yourself to demonize one side in a dispute, then you lose credibility.

“You also endanger others who go into a situation after yourself, and you risk losing your audience because people say, ‘Right, we’ve heard one side of that today. Now maybe we should hear from a journalist speaking from the other side.”

The debate over how to report fairly on a war has been waging ever since there have been wars and its chroniclers. Phillip Knightly’s 1975 book “The First Casualty” argued that Sen. Hiram Johnson was correct in 1917 when he said, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.” Most newspapers took the side of their own government, using reporting skills to back up the state’s propaganda. In the United States, the Vietnam War provided a rare, fractious exception.

Now, after the end of the Cold War that pitted the superpowers against each other in hot spots around the globe, today’s conflicts are more regional and complicated. Thus, most international journalists have tried to describe wars without immediately naming the aggressors. But such caution does not always earn praise from those who look at how news accounts affect international policy.

One sweeping analysis of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda accused journalists of not making it clear soon enough who were the villains.

The comprehensive analysis by government and nongovernment agencies from the United States, Denmark and other countries concluded that news organizations, including the Times of London and the New York Times, produced “appallingly misleading” stories in early 1994 about the conflict.

The 1996 report, called “The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience,” said these newspapers, along with numerous other media outlets, failed to recognize that extremists in the Rwanda government were systematically slaughtering the Tutsis and some of their supporters. Instead of labeling it a genocide, the news accounts described a kind of tribal civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis.

The report said these “distortions” were cited by the United Nations when it withdrew support forces from Rwanda, where the death toll has been estimated at from 500,000 to 1 million. The analysts concluded that “the Western media’s failure to report adequately on the genocide in Rwanda possibly contributed to international indifference and inaction, and hence the crime itself.”

For the journalists and others meeting in Boston, such mistakes are a normal occupational hazard for some international news organizations that increasingly tend to deploy journalists who know little of the culture, history or even geography of the battleground. Unlike Amanpour and Little, who spend months in Bosnia, these instant war correspondents arrive with mini-transmitters, conduct a few hurried interviews with the distressed or dying or the relief workers or government spokesmen, if there are any, and then immediately transmit details to London, New York or Atlanta.

The “quick hit” may be all the public can tolerate, television experts suggest. Interest in stories about wars, famine and genocide elsewhere in the world is flagging.

One poll after the 1994 Rwanda genocide showed that 1% of the television public was interested in the story. Two percent in the same poll said they were interested in the suicide of rock musician Kurt Cobain.

“We have to keep our messages simple” to keep people interested, complained Samatha Bolton, a spokeswoman for Doctors Without Borders, an international relief operation.

“Too many media managers are now saying, ‘What do you mean worrying about not getting it first or not getting it right? Why do we necessarily have to get it at all?’ ” said Canadian Arthur Kent, formerly an NBC news correspondent and now an independent producer of foreign news documentaries from London. “ ‘Why do we have to give up air time that we can use to discuss angels and serial killers from Mars?’ ”