Living history - Peter Leng - The Eagle 2013

THE EAGLE Articles

Living history Peter Leng (1983) studied History at St John’s, and is now Senior World Affairs Producer for BBC News and Series Producer of BBC News: The Editors on BBC1.

ARTICLES

Winter’s midnight sky above the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan is a mesmerising expanse of darkness, brilliantly pinpricked by millions of glinting stars.

It’s transfixing. Dangerously so. For on this freezing night in Tora Bora, in late 2001, a ‘war on terror’ is being fought – and we are here on the front line to report it: a small BBC team, camped high on an exposed, craggy mountain ridge.

Sitting outside our tent, wrapped in blankets, scarves and the thickest of coats, our steamy breath rises eerily up and away; there can be no fires for warmth, the imagined glow of orange heat a suicidal giveaway. We peer nervously down into the deep, dark valley below us, scouring for any hint of noise or movement from the cave complex below. Al Qaeda are cornered there, holed up, they say, with the elusive Osama Bin Laden.

As dawn breaks, the rising light brings with it the distant rumble of a B-52 bomber – and now in the early morning rinse of watery blue sky, we see high above us, in place of the myriad dotted stars, tiny American fighter jets glimmering in the sun’s first rays. F-18s, F-15s. We wait, and watch – for the bombs. And there they are, on the other side of the valley: the bulging orange fireballs mingled in billowing mushroom clouds of grey, black smoke. We count: one, two, three, four… and then the deep, bass booms of the explosions fill the valley, echoing.

We are, it seems, in the front row seats of a surreal cinema. Except this is real.

This is war. This is the world’s superpower against a small, armed band of hardened Chechen, Arab and other jihadist fighters. It’s exciting, it’s frightening – and it’s work. It’s journalism at the sharp end, and nothing beats it.

Returning to Kabul after a fortnight or more in the wilds of the barren Afghan mountains, and driving through the treacherous, rocky passes of the banditinfested Nangarhar gorges, people ask: What was it like? Was it worth it?

Why take the risks?

I have never found a simple answer to the Why question, with a beautiful family at home, but I’ve been drawn to difficult and hostile environments for a multitude of reasons: the challenge, the adrenalin, the adventure – but also, and I do mean this, the cause. The journalism.

Page 26 johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk

Articles THE EAGLE

Without independent witnesses to events around the world, we would be deprived of much of what we know and believe about this planet we live on.

In Sri Lanka in 2009 I fought for months with the authorities in Colombo to allow us, the BBC, to go to the battlefields of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu in the north – to see for ourselves the conflict raging there and to provide an account. But in a controlled military theatre there is no room for improvisation – and the script delivered to the watching world is a two-dimensional fabrication of Sri Lankan government assertions and Tamil Tiger propaganda images. Who to believe?

How could we genuinely tell, sitting in our comfortable hotel room in Colombo?

It was frustrating beyond words. If only we could go, as independent journalists we could offer the 3D option and bigger picture.

Peter in the Great Hall of the People, where China’s new leaders were ‘elected’ to power in November 2012.

This is part and parcel of the journalist’s function: to seek out the helpless, to find the disenfranchised, the marginalised, who have no voice in so many difficult places around the world. As the BBC’s Senior World Affairs Producer I’ve reported often on the victims of societies that don’t care or simply ignore or suppress those who have just cause to complain: the families of the thousands of farmers who commit suicide every year in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra in central India; the victims of chemical weapons attacks in Halabja in Iraq; and the thousands and thousands of dispossessed across China whose homes and lives have been ruined in the country’s headlong rush for growth. These usually poor and isolated people are as much part of

johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk Page 27

ARTICLES

Journalism has its role in bringing to the world’s attention stories that might otherwise fail to blip on our awareness radar. In 1984, when St John’s was my world, the BBC was credited with revealing the horror and calamity of the Ethiopian famine. Twenty years later, on Boxing Day 2004, I found myself as a BBC journalist bound for Banda Aceh on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where we’d heard whispers of a devastating loss of life in the Asian tsunami. The scene of destruction we discovered, and broadcast to the world, was unimaginable.

Apocalyptic. Scarring. Our reports soon ensured the aid effort cranked into gear.

THE EAGLE Articles

ARTICLES Peter on an Argentine naval patrol boat off Ushuaia in April 2012, on the thirtieth anniversary of the start of the Falklands conflict.

our world as the presidents, prime ministers and chief executives we interview all the time. The weak have their place in the annals of history too; it is our job as journalists to give them their voice and record their lives.

Perhaps more than anything, though, it is the desire to find out, to ask questions – dare I say it, though it sounds so pompous – to try to find the truth, which is at the heart of the journalist’s world. In cruder terms, we are nosey. It was this selfsame inquisitive search for an ultimate but undefined reality that inspired my love of studying History at school and at St John’s. The young historian easily morphed into the adult journalist.

The debate about journalist as historian is neither new, nor I believe really relevant to most everyday practising historians and journalists. But it is a conundrum I do juggle with. They are two professions that, Venn diagram like, overlap in their skill sets and ambitions. It was in the 1940s that the Washington Post editorial writer, Alan Barth, penned the oft-quoted leitmotif for many journalists: ‘News is only the first rough draft of history.’ The link is, to my mind, inescapable.

Page 28 johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk

Articles THE EAGLE

I am acutely conscious in many of the events and stories around the world I have covered over my 24 years in the BBC that I have a privileged position to be on hand to see and report that rather clichéd phrase: ‘History in the making’.

Many journalists share this motive; others don’t; that’s fine. It’s a job; a fun one; they get to meet interesting people, go to interesting places and have a good time, quite often drinking! There is no inclination to dress up the trade in cloaks of intellectual dignity and academic value.

Subjectivity, objectivity, they are as much bugbears of journalism as they are of history. When I worked as a Senior Producer on the Radio 4 Today programme and the BBC1 Nine O’Clock News and Ten O’Clock News, concern about perceived bias was the constant alarm bell in our choice and treatment of stories (I should say reports – we’re in the business of fact not fiction!). One can only be aware of one’s own prejudices and background, and as far as possible put those to one side to achieve as close to an objective report or running order for a programme as possible; just as the historian needs to be aware of the undercurrent of personal influences on his or her choice of facts and events in compiling historical accounts. We are all products of our time and our place, and we need to be aware of that always. Only in this way can the journalist or the historian hope to achieve any semblance of impartiality. Despite the not infrequent barrage of criticism – left-wing pinkos, government stooges – impartiality is the fundamental goal of all we do at the BBC. It is crucial to winning the trust of audiences, just as it is vital to the historian in securing the confidence of readers.

There is of course for the historian and journalist a fundamental question that has no simple answer. It is E H Carr’s question: What actually is history? For the journalist: What is news? Is history, or news, the actual event, or is it the reporting of an event? What happened that isn’t reported is just as much history as the

johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk Page 29

ARTICLES

But the historian in me is part of my DNA now, and I do feel a responsibility and a thrill in being in a position where I can have a go at producing that first draft of history. And many of the questions that challenged me as a young historian – and continue to challenge historians today – remain relevant to me as a journalist now. E H Carr’s What is History? is imprinted in my mind, as is Geoffrey Elton’s counterpoint The Practice of History. As a journalist, I feel compelled to remind myself constantly of Carr’s mantra: ‘Study the historian (journalist) before you begin to study the facts (journalism).’ My white, middle-class, Cambridgeeducated past defines me in a way that is quite different from local BBC colleagues with whom I have had the privilege to work over many, many years posted abroad in East Asia, South Asia and Europe. We see the world through very different eyes; it’s a fact.

THE EAGLE Articles

event that is recorded. Or is it? Is history more subtle still: rather than the event itself, is it the significance attributed to a particular event by the person who chose to report it?

All difficult questions. If truth be told they are questions far more likely to trouble the historian than the journalist. Nowadays, in a fast-changing media landscape, with mind-boggling advances in broadcast technology, there is so little time to question motives, choices and reasoning in journalism. Immediacy is increasingly all-important.

ARTICLES

This pressure of time is in itself redefining the ‘history’ that we journalists are recording today. The instant nature of news reporting and delivery has transformed journalism, and thereby these first accounts of historical record.

Newspapers from 150 years ago can still be consulted for testimony and precise information. The Times’ William Howard Russell, one of the first modern war correspondents – clearly a hero! – is still a primary source for trying to understand the Crimean War of the 1850s.

Today, William Howard Russell would be tweeting from Sevastopol, or posting pictures of the battle on his Facebook page. The rapidly changing world of social media presents exciting opportunities to share information quickly and widely, but it poses the danger of inaccurate and false information being taken as gospel. It’s not inconceivable that the historians of the 2050s will look back for source material at today’s Twitter feeds and Facebook messages stored on some Big Brother mega server. This is an alarming prospect. Recently, colleagues from the BBC Persian Service had their Facebook accounts hacked as part of what the BBC claimed was an operation by the Iranian authorities to discredit them, with scandalous and libelous falsehoods posted as if by my colleagues on their status alerts and news feeds. A Google search still finds and shows these lies despite those fake Facebook accounts having been closed down. How far can we trust history online? How do we know for sure who’s posting information? I won’t begin on who’s editing Wikipedia pages.

Of course, printed books can also contain inaccuracies, accounts based on hearsay, and so forth. But the glut of wild ‘information’ in the world of social media is on a whole new, some might say, overwhelming scale.

The rush to tell, to be first with the news, drives the modern television news industry as well. The BBC still errs on the side of caution, checking sources, usually two sources at least, and double-checking them; but the pressure to compete with rivals who throw the first scraps of rumour onto air as news is a tough one to counter. For three weeks in Portugal in 2007 I was in charge of the BBC’s coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. It was a daily, an hourly, battle with BBC editors back in London not to put on air ‘breaking news’

Page 30 johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk

Articles THE EAGLE

developments that a rival broadcaster was airing – and which of course turned out not long after to be wholly inaccurate or wrong. If what we are doing is for historical record, there is an even greater imperative for us to get it right for the historians of tomorrow.

Another change is surfacing in the broadcast world of 24-hour news: the emphasis now, I feel, is less about recording an event than experiencing it.

As television or radio journalists we deal in the ephemeral; we are not narrating a finished event but presenting that event in real time, showing the history in the making – but it is history which is lived and experienced, less an account of record than a presence or observation.

Filming the aftermath of a suicide bomb attack in Kabul.

johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk Page 31

ARTICLES

Attempts at providing context in breaking news stories are sometimes no more than a feeble effort to afford some intellectual legitimacy to the history in motion that is being reported. The journalist and historian in me on these occasions do argue: is it not arrogant to suppose that as a journalist I am really a scholar of instant history? Yes, I may be involved in the reporting of something which future historians may use to write the history books of tomorrow. But the historian in me says that the journalist is doing no more than taking a living moment, reporting it now before it is depleted and erased by time – it is not in any sense complete

THE EAGLE Articles

ARTICLES A scientist being filmed recording glacial melt for a climate change story in India.

This image shows the Ganges river starting its course out of the Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas.

Page 32 johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk

Articles THE EAGLE

or sophisticated or really adding to greater understanding. It is informing, enlightening perhaps, but not necessarily improving comprehension.

After much consideration, however, I do concur with a dictum of that rather dark existentialist from my French-studying days at school, Albert Camus: ‘The journalist is the historian of the moment.’

Peter Leng

Peter on a poppy eradication mission with security forces in Herat in western Afghanistan.

johnian.joh.cam.ac.uk Page 33

ARTICLES

That will do for me. I don’t want to invoke any grandiose notions of intellectual pursuit in my peripatetic, here today gone tomorrow encounters with events and people in this wonderfully fascinating world of ours. Perhaps I am both a servant of future historians and a historian of the present. Either way, I am a journalist, and I am a historian. As both, I seek a narrative and I chronicle. That’s it. Like the custodians of what was happening in the Middle Ages, I am a Chronicler. And I am excited and happy to do that, not in an office or study, but huddled on a barren, rocky mountain-top gazing at the most beautiful of night skies above the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. My very own front row seat. This is journalism; this is living history.