Martin Bell 1.5pp.qxp_Layout 1 20/04/2022 12:59 Page 1
FESTIVAL | POLITICS
The man in the white suit
In over 30 years as a foreign affairs correspondent, Martin Bell saw major changes in the way news was reported. Emma Clegg asks about his time as a reporter, as an MP and as a UNICEF ambassador, ahead of his arrival at The Bath Festival
W
hat’s the difference between a brigade and a battalion? Martin Bell OBE knew the answer to this when he worked as a broadcast war reporter in the 1960s. Born in 1938, Bell was one of the last in the UK to be called up for compulsory two-year national service, serving in Cyprus during the Greek Cypriot War of Independence. “It was a very good training because they taught you fieldcraft, which is how to stay alive in dangerous places, and how to operate in a small team, which is what I was doing in my later years in Bosnia.” Bell had a distinguished career as a foreign affairs correspondent – over 30 years he covered 11 conflicts and reported from 80 countries, among them Vietnam, the Middle East, Nigeria, Angola and Northern Ireland. He saw many changes, both technical and operational, in this time. “I had two assignments in Vietnam in 1967 and 1972 – we just shot the raw footage with a recorded commentary, wrapped the cans of film in an onion bag so customs and security could see what they were, and shipped them to London. It would be anything up to four days old by the time it was used.” Another transition came with the introduction of colour film. “We moved from black and white to colour film around 1969. Prior to that, in any field of conflict blood was always seen as black. Suddenly colour comes in and blood is red. The BBC started flinching from the portrayal of real-world violence and there was a limit to
what we were allowed to show, especially in the Balkan Wars.” In the mid-1990s Bell developed a style of reporting that he called the “journalism of attachment”, one that rejects rigid neutrality, that “cares as well as knows”. Journalists, he felt, had a new moral obligation to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in conflict zones, and to express an attachment to the ‘good’ side. “It struck me after three and a half years of the Bosnian War that there was no obligation to be impartial between the armed and the unarmed and the victim and the aggressor. What I suggested was not a licence to be opinionated, but a freedom from this mechanical balancing act, which was used when I started in the newsroom in the 1960s.” Referring to the dangers faced by war reporters today, Bell says that the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 reorientated the landscape: “Everything changed with 9/11 as, especially in the Middle East, journalists were in danger not just of being caught in the crossfire, but of being targeted, ransomed, kidnapped. There was therefore a retreat from frontline journalism to what I call ‘rooftop journalism’. It’s still very dangerous, but the hazards are of a different order.” Martin Bell is appearing at The Bath Festival on 15 May where, wearing his trademark white suit, he will look back on the efforts to keep the peace since the end of the Second World War and consider the current political landscape with broadcaster and journalist Mark Lawson. His astute judgement on matters of war will also be applied
“I sometimes think what a field day Goebbels would have had if the internet had existed in those days”
28 TheBATHMagazine
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May 2022
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iSSUe 231
