Martin Bell is a former BBC correspondent who has reported on several conflicts from all over the world. His hard-hitting style of reporting came to its peak as he watched the horrors of the Bosnian war unfold in 1992 and 1993. It was to leave its mark on him both mentally and physically. He was wounded by shrapnel whilst reporting from Sarajevo.
His dedication to reporting on the unjust had led him from the regional reporting in Norwich to frontlines in Vietnam, the Middle East, Angola and Rwanda. In 1997 he left the BBC and stood for election to parliament in an anti-corruption campaign. Twenty-four days later he became MP for Tatton, with an 11,000 majority.
He is a critic of aspects of today's broadcast journalism, especially rooftop reporting, which he describes as "puppetry". He now provides commentary on international affairs and is currently writing a book on the recent conflict in Iraq. He also acts as an ambassador for UNICEF.
ON REPORTING THE IRAQ WAR
Commentary by Martin Bell
I think the plethora of rolling news channels is having a very bad effect on the coverage they serve up. They tended to be extraordinarily excitable and place a premium on being first and fastest, rather than being the most accurate.
So we had a whole succession of rumours passing off as fact. What was advertised as breaking news was in fact just rumour unfounded. I believe that Umm Qasr was supposedly liberated or secured eight times before it actually was. We had a report that Tarik Aziz had defected. There was an early report of a great popular uprising in Basra. Complete nonsense.
There now exists in any major foreign news story a satellite dish on the roof of a hotel or roof of a TV station and some poor soul, for his or her network will be put up there all day - it's called I believe now being a dish monkey - or if you’re a woman correspondent - a dish bitch. It has nothing to do with journalism. It has more to do with puppetry and I think it's time to let it go.
I was very critical when I heard of the embedding experiment which is actually not just attaching but incorporating reporters into military units. But I think some of it has worked. They tended to identify with soldiers, which was part of the scheme.
And I think that as long as television is capable of showing that kind of reporting then I would actually argue for the embedding of correspondents in future wars.
Some of the 900 embeds were showbiz correspondents so it does them no harm to understand the realities of soldiering. In fact it makes them better journalists, I would think.
Some of them tended to be very gung-ho. I objected to the editorial use of the word coalition which sounds as if it was a broad alliance of many countries when in fact it was two at the sharp end
Some of the reporting has been extremely distinguished and very brave and I think we’ve been able to have some idea of what went on, on the ground, which we wouldn’t have without it.
I think the correspondents in Baghdad did extremely well in dangerous and highly censored circumstances. So there has been some really good journalism come out of this war.
I think the most marked failure was to give a rather one-sided account of what happened. You saw the soldiers blazing away in their tanks and armoured personnel carriers. Well you didn't see much of what was on the other side - not in the western media - of the casualties and the costs.
And I think that if we sanitise warfare to the extent that we have done, we face a real problem of making it seem an acceptable way of settling differences which it is not.
The most extraordinary combat footage of the war was shot by an NBC cameraman Craig White. I thought it was absolutely the best traditions of war reporting. It was low key, it was with the soldiers, it showed what life was like.
Craig White was with a unit of US Marines which was ambushed on the outskirts of Baghdad. It came under very very heavy fire which they returned. One of the shots showed a marine who was himself having a wound to his leg treated poking his rifle around the corner of an APC and firing back.
This wasn't a victory and there was nothing triumphalistic about it. They were lucky to get out alive. The reporter said it makes your teeth rattle. Well that's what war does; it makes your teeth rattle.
I think the attacks on Al-Jazeera - both verbally and in the end with missiles - were absolutely indefensible. It's entirely right that the Arab world should have its own sources of information.
Why should it be forced to rely on the western agencies – Reuters, the BBC, the American networks for news going on in its own region? And of course Al-Jazeera showed captured and dead British and Americans. The western networks showed captured and dead Iraqis.
I think the interviewing of POWs is probably an infringement of their rights. But they're part of the landscape of war. I was in the last Gulf War years ago and we had thousands of Iraqis surrendered. It is one of the things that happen.
And the thing to do with the Arab networks out there is not to revile them but to court them – to try and put your point of view - that's what our government should be doing.
There is an issue about the showing of real world violence. The BBC has tended always to be too cautious for fear of upsetting people. I was able to show very little of the realities of the Bosnian war. I argued about this for three and half years and lost the argument.
In the end, if you're only showing the shooting and not the victims you're again showing a pretty fine war and saying it is a fine way to settle differences, which it isn't
There are limits to what people can take. They have a kind of threshold and they won't go over it. But yes, I would argue for showing more than we have shown in the past.
We are in an age of what I call celebrity journalism - in peace as much as in war. We might as well have a newspaper called the Daily Beckham.
It's made me rethink the values of journalism. I've been appalled at some of the commentary, especially some of the American commentary. If you look for instance at the number of commentators urging the Americans to attack the television station in Baghdad, as if that were a legitimate target.
These quasi-journalists, the American ones, were more gung-ho and more onside with the Pentagon than ever in the past. I find that extraordinary and actually a disgraceful betrayal of what journalism is all about.
I think there is a chauvinistic element that our casualties matter more than Iraqi casualties, which I don't share. To me the casualties were unacceptably high generally, even if by the standards of high-intensity warfare they were relatively low in this case.
There were thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed and each one of those British servicemen dead is a personal family tragedy.
We used to put film in parcels and put them on aeroplanes. It would be processed and edited three or four days later. Now it's instantaneous. That's one thing that's changed. Another is the multiplicity of channels and the ferocity of competition.
And the extraordinary numbers of journalists. When Nato went into Kosovo they were accompanied or followed by I believe 2,754 hacks. It's ridiculous. It's gone mad.
Did we have to go to war for this cause? And you only go to war in a desperate last case scenario. It hadn't reached that point. Iraq was being disarmed day by day. Missiles were being destroyed.
I think historians are going to come to judge this as the greatest mistake by a British prime minister in 50 years.
Martin Bell is a former BBC correspondent who has reported on several conflicts from all over the world. His hard-hitting style of reporting came to its peak as he watched the horrors of the Bosnian war unfold in 1992 and 1993. It was to leave its mark on him both mentally and physically. He was wounded by shrapnel whilst reporting from Sarajevo.
His dedication to reporting on the unjust had led him from the regional reporting in Norwich to frontlines in Vietnam, the Middle East, Angola and Rwanda. In 1997 he left the BBC and stood for election to parliament in an anti-corruption campaign. Twenty-four days later he became MP for Tatton, with an 11,000 majority.
He is a critic of aspects of today's broadcast journalism, especially rooftop reporting, which he describes as "puppetry". He now provides commentary on international affairs and is currently writing a book on the recent conflict in Iraq. He also acts as an ambassador for UNICEF.
ON REPORTING THE IRAQ WAR
Commentary by Martin Bell
I think the plethora of rolling news channels is having a very bad effect on the coverage they serve up. They tended to be extraordinarily excitable and place a premium on being first and fastest, rather than being the most accurate.
So we had a whole succession of rumours passing off as fact. What was advertised as breaking news was in fact just rumour unfounded. I believe that Umm Qasr was supposedly liberated or secured eight times before it actually was. We had a report that Tarik Aziz had defected. There was an early report of a great popular uprising in Basra. Complete nonsense.
There now exists in any major foreign news story a satellite dish on the roof of a hotel or roof of a TV station and some poor soul, for his or her network will be put up there all day - it's called I believe now being a dish monkey - or if you’re a woman correspondent - a dish bitch. It has nothing to do with journalism. It has more to do with puppetry and I think it's time to let it go.
I was very critical when I heard of the embedding experiment which is actually not just attaching but incorporating reporters into military units. But I think some of it has worked. They tended to identify with soldiers, which was part of the scheme.
And I think that as long as television is capable of showing that kind of reporting then I would actually argue for the embedding of correspondents in future wars.
Some of the 900 embeds were showbiz correspondents so it does them no harm to understand the realities of soldiering. In fact it makes them better journalists, I would think.
Some of them tended to be very gung-ho. I objected to the editorial use of the word coalition which sounds as if it was a broad alliance of many countries when in fact it was two at the sharp end
Some of the reporting has been extremely distinguished and very brave and I think we’ve been able to have some idea of what went on, on the ground, which we wouldn’t have without it.
I think the correspondents in Baghdad did extremely well in dangerous and highly censored circumstances. So there has been some really good journalism come out of this war.
I think the most marked failure was to give a rather one-sided account of what happened. You saw the soldiers blazing away in their tanks and armoured personnel carriers. Well you didn't see much of what was on the other side - not in the western media - of the casualties and the costs.
And I think that if we sanitise warfare to the extent that we have done, we face a real problem of making it seem an acceptable way of settling differences which it is not.
The most extraordinary combat footage of the war was shot by an NBC cameraman Craig White. I thought it was absolutely the best traditions of war reporting. It was low key, it was with the soldiers, it showed what life was like.
Craig White was with a unit of US Marines which was ambushed on the outskirts of Baghdad. It came under very very heavy fire which they returned. One of the shots showed a marine who was himself having a wound to his leg treated poking his rifle around the corner of an APC and firing back.
This wasn't a victory and there was nothing triumphalistic about it. They were lucky to get out alive. The reporter said it makes your teeth rattle. Well that's what war does; it makes your teeth rattle.
I think the attacks on Al-Jazeera - both verbally and in the end with missiles - were absolutely indefensible. It's entirely right that the Arab world should have its own sources of information.
Why should it be forced to rely on the western agencies – Reuters, the BBC, the American networks for news going on in its own region? And of course Al-Jazeera showed captured and dead British and Americans. The western networks showed captured and dead Iraqis.
I think the interviewing of POWs is probably an infringement of their rights. But they're part of the landscape of war. I was in the last Gulf War years ago and we had thousands of Iraqis surrendered. It is one of the things that happen.
And the thing to do with the Arab networks out there is not to revile them but to court them – to try and put your point of view - that's what our government should be doing.
There is an issue about the showing of real world violence. The BBC has tended always to be too cautious for fear of upsetting people. I was able to show very little of the realities of the Bosnian war. I argued about this for three and half years and lost the argument.
In the end, if you're only showing the shooting and not the victims you're again showing a pretty fine war and saying it is a fine way to settle differences, which it isn't
There are limits to what people can take. They have a kind of threshold and they won't go over it. But yes, I would argue for showing more than we have shown in the past.
We are in an age of what I call celebrity journalism - in peace as much as in war. We might as well have a newspaper called the Daily Beckham.
It's made me rethink the values of journalism. I've been appalled at some of the commentary, especially some of the American commentary. If you look for instance at the number of commentators urging the Americans to attack the television station in Baghdad, as if that were a legitimate target.
These quasi-journalists, the American ones, were more gung-ho and more onside with the Pentagon than ever in the past. I find that extraordinary and actually a disgraceful betrayal of what journalism is all about.
I think there is a chauvinistic element that our casualties matter more than Iraqi casualties, which I don't share. To me the casualties were unacceptably high generally, even if by the standards of high-intensity warfare they were relatively low in this case.
There were thousands and thousands of Iraqis killed and each one of those British servicemen dead is a personal family tragedy.
We used to put film in parcels and put them on aeroplanes. It would be processed and edited three or four days later. Now it's instantaneous. That's one thing that's changed. Another is the multiplicity of channels and the ferocity of competition.
And the extraordinary numbers of journalists. When Nato went into Kosovo they were accompanied or followed by I believe 2,754 hacks. It's ridiculous. It's gone mad.
Did we have to go to war for this cause? And you only go to war in a desperate last case scenario. It hadn't reached that point. Iraq was being disarmed day by day. Missiles were being destroyed.
I think historians are going to come to judge this as the greatest mistake by a British prime minister in 50 years.
