Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s a pretty terrifying book for an editor to read, but I think it’s essential reading for anyone sending reporters into war. I think modern editors tend to feel quite superior to their predecessors, the ones who sent official reporters to the First World War, whose job was nothing but to make sure that people at home felt that everything was OK. We don’t do that any more. It’s useful for an editor to read this book. It will not help you avoid every mistake. Some of these mistakes are woven into the very fabric of producing a newspaper.
Now Philip Knightley and The First Casualty. He first wrote this in the 1970s after Vietnam, and has subsequently updated it to include most of the more recent wars. Tell us about it.
Yes. It’s a pretty terrifying book for an editor to read, but I think it’s essential reading for anyone sending reporters into war. I think modern editors tend to feel quite superior to their predecessors, the ones who sent official reporters to the First World War, whose job was nothing but to make sure that people at home felt that everything was OK. We don’t do that any more. We also, I think, have tended to feel quite superior to the shadowy editors of Scoop, the ones who are obsessed only with having some identifiable “good cause” they can play to their tabloid readers and having a low telex bill at the end of the day. But, actually, the chapter on Kosovo in the new Knightley, whose coverage you and I watched together at The Times and whose direction we played a part in, makes quite a grim story about us.
Those Serbian rape camps, a huge issue for the justification of the aerial bombing, were, it seems, based on one source. The original journalist was totally blameless, of course, but Robin Cook was asked if he could confirm the suspicions about the rape camps, and he confirmed that there were suspicions! And that created an astonishingly widespread account. Well, I’m not sure that even now we’re clear on what happened and what didn’t, but the journalism analysed by Knightley does suggest that it wasn’t journalism’s finest hour.
As for how patronising we are about the journalists in the First World War, well, at least those journalists were actually there. Because Kosovo was an aerial war (remember it was the first war in history where no military personnel suffered even a scratch) there was no way of knowing exactly what was going on. The best that we could do was to attempt the widest possible range of reporting – say, one person from the Serb side, others embedded with Nato, and some guy hammering around the battlefield trying to get to wherever there were smoke and flashes. That way you could just about get an idea of what was going on for a very “first draft of history”.
And again, it’s useful for an editor to read the book. It will not help you avoid every mistake. Some of these mistakes are woven into the very fabric of producing a newspaper, for all the technological changes that have taken place since the Crimean War.
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Peter Stothard is the editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He edited The Times for a decade, between 1992 and 2002, and was knighted for services to the newspaper industry in 2003.
