The Daily Novel

My head of department at City University’s Department of Journalism today gets the first ever Xcitybob Blogging Journalist of the Year Award. He gets his gong not for anything he has done in his day job but for a post on Adrian Monck Online, which he regards as his hobby and which I call moonlighting.

His post on Wednesday night was called ‘Balfour Remembered’. The category under which he gets his award (which I have just invented) is for ‘Insightful connections between events in history and important contemporary events’. I promise to think of a shorter title before the actual awards dinner at the Ritz Hotel, when I hope to get Madonna to present the awards.

The essence of the post is:

‘Arthur Balfour was a former British Prime Minister. In 1917 he was the Foreign Secretary and this was his declaration:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

In the Middle East that paragraph, written on November 2nd that year, carries a historic resonance far beyond its impact here in the UK.’

The first point I want to make is journalistic. Monck is following a journalistic tradition of pegging a story to an anniversary when there is not enough ‘news’ to fill tomorrow’s newspaper. Except that he pegs it to the 89th anniversary, rather than waiting next year for the ninetieth! Further down the story he reminds his readers that this year is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David’s Hotel, when 92 people were killed, 28 of them Britons.

The journalistic point is the emphasis in journalism of justifying what we put in the papers because it is fresh news (and hopefully an exclusive ’scoop’). Journalists, and journalism teachers, do not pay sufficient attention to the need to put what is happening today in its historical context.

At its extreme this journalistic convention is taken to the point of absurdity. When I first went to live in New York in 1959 I was freelancing. There was no internet then so the lack of a newspaper library was a substantial disadvantage for the kind of stories I was writing for the Financial Times in London. There was a financial newspaper near my flat called, I think, the Journal of Commerce. So I visited the editor and, after asking his opinions on the current state of Wall Street, asked if I could use their cuttings library occasionally. ‘We don’t have a library’, he told me proudly, ‘We print news not history.’

My second point is to do with what these two anniversaries remind us of.

The coverage of the bombing of the King David’s Hotel in 1946 had a big impact on me because it came at the time that I was just becoming an avid newspaper reader. The coverage that still sticks in my memory now is that of the Wolverhampton Express & Star, which gave it massive coverage. Local evening newspapers in those days had got used to devoting a lot more space to national affairs, because during the war the readers wanted to get the national news in the evening as well as from their national morning. (And, of course, there was no television and many of my neighbours did not even have a radio.) Additionally one of the men killed in the explosion, was a British Army officer from a well-known local family.

The angle of the Express & Star, and that of the Daily Mail, which came through our letter box in the morning, has many similarities to the way many newspapers today cover the war against terror. The Bin Laden of the day was the Stern Gang, the ‘terrorists’ who must be exterminated. In retrospect the coverage was blatantly partisan and possibly was fuelled by unconscious anti-semitism. That vein continued for many years, so that Ernie Bevin, then Labour’s Foreign Secretary, got an easy ride, and it was not until I started to read contemporary history, that I discovered that Bevin was actually helping the Stern Gang’s recruitment by turning back ships which were taking the victims of the concentration camps to a new life in Palestine. What this story also reminds us of is that yesterday’s ‘terrorists’ often become today’s political leaders, like Nelson Mandela, Fidel Castro and the Stern Gang’s Begin, who some years later became Prime Minister of Israel.

The Balfour declaration is also a timely reminder that the British bear some responsibility for the creation of Israel and some responsibility for the subsequent problems because of our policies and the way we handled the Palestine mandate. More importantly they remind us of Balfour’s insistence ‘that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.

That is the nub of the Middle Eastern conflict and the reason the Hizbullah ‘terrorists’ are firing their rockets at Israel. And all journalists need remind their readers of it. Consider the massive coverage this week of the trial and forty-year sentence of the Muslim convert who was plotting to blow up the Thames (as one of the newspapers put it). He was making plans for atrocities equal to 9/11 and I am thankful that the police have caught him and locked him up. But I want to make a point about the newspaper coverage not the conduct of the trial.

You don’t get locked up for forty years in Britain for having wicked intentions. So the prosecution case was based on the fact that he had met with a Bin Laden man in Pakistan and he knew another of the actual bombers. I have no way of knowing the truth of this, And covering terrorism is not one of my specialist areas. But I do have journalist friends who have covered international intelligence matters for many years. They doubt whether there is a Bin Laden gang at all in the sense of a group who know each other and have a recognised leader.

This point, although it is made from time to time by the serious media, gets totally drowned by the blanket coverage of terrorists as in this week’s trial. This has two serious results.

It inflames the fears of readers. So that we wonder when we walk the streets that the matronly woman doing her shopping might be carrying a bomb under her burkha. And we worry, like Jack Straw, whether the niqab is covering an expression of hate. Is she going to whip out a gun and shoot me in the middle of surgery? This in turn makes all Muslims feel alienated and distrustful. And it makes it less likely than they will pass on information to the police about someone they know who is possibly a terrorist.

The second point, is that it focuses public attention on just one threat. While I totally accept that training camps for Muslim terrorists do exist, the reality of the world in which we live is that tomorrow’s atrocity might be committed by someone totally different. It is not too difficult to get hold of weapons of considerable destruction. The next time it might be a Christian fundamentalist or someone like those American fathers with a grudge who go to their local school and shoot a bunch of the children and their teachers.

All this goes to show that doing responsible journalism is a difficult job. And it makes me feel a little guilty about yesterday’s blog about George Bush and his daily conversations with the Texan oil God. George Bush needs to be reminded of the Balfour declaration before he sends his next dollop of dollars to the Israeli war treasury. But also I should not overdo the caricature. Particularly since he has just had a smack in the face from the American electorate. Above all I don’t want to make him so angry so that he starts bombing my street.

Acutally George Bush is not a Texan. He was born in New England, the heartland of America’s white Anglo Saxon Protestants. But he has spent a lot of his working life with American oil men, who mostly side with the Arabs in Middle Eastern conflicts. So I should not make jokes suggesting he is taking his instructions from on high. His policy on Israel is probably much more to do with a quite pragmatic assessment of the importance of the Jewish vote in American politics.

This blog and the previous one about Adrian Monck Online arose out our little private war. On reflection I thing that blogging journalists should from time to time let the readers know about such things, which cause them to write the things they write.

Another long blog. But I promise that my speech to the Ritz Hotel Awards Ceremony will be a lot shorter, and I hope, a lot funnier.