Journalism of attachment

This interview with Martin Bell is - though I am biased - worth reading:

When, in 1992, he was badly wounded by shrapnel while reporting in Sarajevo, it was a life-changing moment. In his book, The Journalism Of Attachment, Bell wrote about journalism that cares as well as knows a marked difference from the "only time will tell" school that BBC journalists were educated in.

"Bosnia knocked that out of me," Bell says with a chortle. "You can be fair to everybody, but you can't stand neutrally between good and evil. You can't say well, Hitler killed six million Jews, but my word he made the trains run on time, because you are not dealing with moral equivalents."

I have differences with the notion of a journalism of attachment. I would prefer to say that the role of a journalist is to describe the world as accurately as he is able, aware of the partiality of his information and his personal bias, but determined not to abridge the truth so as to avoid offending sensibilities. My criticism of BBC journalism is that it is far too concerned with avoiding offence. Rather than being 'biased', as many critics (including my friend Stephen Pollard) charge, the BBC has the opposite problem of confusing the concepts of objectivity and equidistance. But the notion that describing the parties in the Balkan wars of the 1990s as protagonists of a comparable kind was an offence against the journalism of understanding as well as of attachment.

I try to keep non-political autobiographical or family material to a minimum on this site, but I should add that Martin was a great journalist, and I am ever grateful for having learned from him how to speak in public. Never use notes; never begin a sentence if you don't know how it's going to end.