You may wonder why I have been excoriating Thundering Liars in the paid media, politics and academia and not paid due tribute to honest men, women and AC/BC commentators or even BBC ones who don’t know which way to turn. One reason is that if I identified any of them in Ireland their employers might sack them. But I’ll give credit to some British commentators who have impressed me, starting with Robert Fisk.
Fisk reported from Ireland, mainly from the North, for THE TIMES of London in the early 1970s. Unlike most British journalists he didn’t sit in the bar of Belfast’s Europa Hotel and send unedited, or unattributed, Army and Northern Ireland Office reports to his paper. Nor did he accept communications from Republicans, Unionist or other interested parties unexamined. He neither glorified nor demonised any of the actors. He reported the actions, but sought to understand the motivation of the actors. He learned their local context, Irish and wider contexts. He subsequently covered Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, and many of the wars in the Middle East. He is anathema to dishonest regimes, and so far as I can remember parted company with THE TIMES about forty years ago.
Fisk has won numerous awards for his journalism but perhaps the one that should clinch his reputation is the attack on him by the Sunday Independent’s Eoghan Harris for his criticism of George W Bush’s war on Iraq.
One honest commentator is ex-MP Mattherw Parris, a Tory who served under Thatcher’ still has a weekly column in THE TIMES. I don’t share all his opinions, but reckon he’s probably the paper’s most intelligent correspondent by a long chalk, But his honesty stands out. When Lord Saville’s Enquiry’s report confirmed, in 2010, what the World and its mother had known for 38 years about the British Army’s murder of fourteen unarmed demonstrators in Derry in 1972, Parris recalled that THE TIMES, in its obituary of Lord Widgery had praised that scoundrel’s 1972 Report which exonerated the British Army and condemned their victims. Widgery was Lord Chief Justice of England. In more enlightened times Widgery’s stinking carcass would have been exhumed and hanged from a bridge over London’s Thames or Londonderry’s Foyle with that of Harold Evans who edited THE T IMES when Widgery’s obituary was published in 1981*
I have been re-reading Chris Mullin’s memoir “Hinterland” first published in 2016. He previously published three volumes of brilliant diaries, some novels and “Error of Judgement: the truth about the Birmingham bombings.” His exposure of the flawed conviction of the Birmingham Six won him THE SUN Headline LOONY MP BACKS BOMB GANG. He has retained his equanimity, good humour and common sense, and is the least ideological writer or politician imaginable. He doesn’t bear grudges. But one of the many virtues of his memoir is that while he forgives, he does not forget.
He recalls his travels in China in places where he was the first foreigner to be seen there, and in Laos, when nobody in the West knew about the American carpet-bombing of rice-farmers who had never heard of America nor seen the Americans who sat comfortably seven miles above them heroically defending freedom. He was in Phnom Penh, in Cambodia, when “another journalist, twiddling with the dial on his transistor radio” overheard messages between the bombers blasting the surrounding countryside, and their controllers in the American embassy in the city. The American Congress was unaware of the war launched on Cambodia which displaced its Government, brought the Khymer Rouge to power and helped win a Nobel Prize for Henry Kissinger.
One of Mullin’s many remarkable discoveries – that The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent John Draw was an officer in the South Vietnamese Army, Lieutenant Nguyen Ngoc Phac, an aide to its Chief of Staff, who used to type out his copy for The Daily Telegraph, in Reuters office in Saigon. Mullin passed this intelligence to The Guardian’s Diary Editor, but that paper preferred not to reveal the scam the Telegraph was pulling on its readers.
When in 1981 I tried to interest papers as diverse, or supposedly diverse as the Guardian and the Morning Star on a lie published in THE TIMES (then edited by Harold Evans) I had no more success than Mullin had then.
Sed Magna est Veritas, et Praevalebit …………..and with a bit of luck we’ll live to see it prevail.
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