What happens when journalists take sides

This is a curious book. Its title and the name of its publisher suggest that it is going to be an indictment by two journalists of their old profession. These two are now safe and snug in higher education: Stewart Purvis, a former chief executive of ITN, became Professor of Television Journalism at City University in London, where Jeff Hulbert is an honorary research fellow.

For here the roll-call begins: up first is W.N. Ewer, who between the wars wrote for the Daily Herald and is mysteriously thought to have been responsible for the lines ‘How odd/ Of God/To choose/The Jews’, though Purvis and Hulbert do not mention this. Instead, they assemble details of an even more mysterious career, first as a man who ran a Soviet spy network, then became so rabidly anti-communist he was capable of referring to Stalin as a latter-day Genghis Khan. MI5 spied on him for his entire career, he spied on them and, naturally, he was then given the CBE and treated to a retirement party by the foreign secretary Rab Butler. He had avoided wartime service by being given a job on Lord Astor’s estate at Cliveden, where he was described as ‘a swineherd’. His is a very English story.

Then there is Walter Duranty, the Englishman who covered Russia for the New York Times during the 1930s, when millions of deaths through famine were being caused by Stalin’s enforced collectivisation of agriculture, but who somehow overlooked this. ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ he reflected.

And there is Guy Burgess, who worked for the BBC, the Foreign Office and the KGB all at the same time, yet managed to fit in an affair with Harold Nicolson, MP and member of the Joint Broadcasting Committee (while another member of the JBC, Hilda Matheson, may at the time have been entangled with Vita Sackville-West, Nicolson’s wife). Not since Robespierre — who just wanted to kill people — has a public body been so busy. It all got too much for Burgess, who ran off to find peace behind the Iron Curtain.  As did John Peet, Reuters’ correspondent in Germany, who absconded with the office petty cash in lieu of notice, Reuters sending on what was owing, plus his pension contributions. (Details like this make you proud to be an Englishman.)

But at this point (it is 1963, and we are roughly one third of the way through the book), the theme changes abruptly and the first stirrings of heroism are heard. Two reporters, Reg Foster and Brendan Mulholland, chose prison rather than reveal the sources for their stories about the spy and transvestite John Vassall — a decision only slightly undercut by the suggestion that they had no sources anyway, the two having made it all up. No matter: the experience gave Mulholland material for his first novel, which of course was subsequently published by the prime minister’s family firm (a twist no one was able to lay on Stalin).

Then there is a wonderfully Tom Sharpe-like subplot, headed by a Mrs Pugh-Pugh, whose late husband, a colonel, sold female underclothing to Vassall, whom he knew as Brenda — a name thought ugly by his widow. Neither Foster nor Mulholland, who both served sentences of some months, could have made this part up.

It was television news, and the confidence of its celebrity reporters in crossing the line between impartiality and comment, that brought real drama: Charles Wheeler, on a royal tour, was overheard to say, ‘I wish that bloody woman would go home, I’m bored with this trip.’ Still, that was in a pub. Martin Bell in the Balkans and Frederick Forsyth in Biafra openly took sides in their reports, as did Sandy Gall on horseback with the mujahideen, at the time the good guys in Afghanistan.

But then it was difficult to retain impartiality, as the bodies piled up in the background and the newsreaders warned that some scenes would be of a harrowing/distressing/painful nature. Lindsey Hilsum had not only to cope with this in Rwanda but with a tsunami of acronyms — the CDR, RPF, RTLMC, ICTY, ICRC — which in the end gave me a headache.

Though admittedly not half as much of one as did the first indictment brought by the authors, in this case against John Simpson. Few people, said Simpson, came out of the Bosnian war with much credit. According to Purvis and Hulbert he was not among them. ITN had broadcast some shocking footage of emaciated Muslim prisoners behind barbed wire which went round the world. Simpson could only comment:

“The skeletal figures weren’t inside the barbed wire ...they were outside it. The wire was old, and ran round a small enclosure. The cameraman got behind the wire to film the scene.

Ah well, that’s all it was.