A decade ago I was asked to meet a group of journalists from Belarus who were crossing over the border into Latvia for a few days. Latvia was just joining the European Union and the trip,funded by the British Foreign Office, was intended to give the Belarussians some idea of the freedoms enjoyed by their journalistic counterparts in a ‘normal’ European country. My strongest memory of our time together in the Latvian capital,Riga,was not their enthusiasm for learning about European institutions because frankly they weren’t that interested,it was the presence among them of a journalist from the Belarus state broadcaster who seemed to be taking copious notes of not only what I said but what her colleagues from various newspapers said to me. To their credit this note-taking didn’t seem to inhibit conversation,the Belarussians seemed used to it.

This month I finally got to visit Belarus itself as part of my hobby/obsession with travelling to every country in Europe.I found the centre of the capital Minsk apparently more prosperous than one might have expected,no more shops with nothing on the shelves though the surly Soviet style of service remains amongst the older staff.Lots of casinos seem to have opened since Putin cracked down on them in Russia and five star hotels are opening for the richer casino tourists. I stayed in a three star Soviet era hotel where men in dark suits still sit around in the foyer with nothing much to do other than keep an eye on the customers. I visited the block of flats where Lee Harvey Oswald lived for a time as a defector from the U.S before returning to live in Dallas with the wife,Marina,he met at a dance in Minsk. Most of the city’s other landmarks  relate to World War Two which is understandable when you remember that a quarter of Belarus’s population was killed by the Nazis, many of them in the numerous incidents when German troops and collaborators herded villagers into barns and set fire to them.Belarus is the country where a group of Jewish partisans living in the forests fought the German army,as portrayed in the film ‘Defiance’ with Daniel Craig.Minsk certainly earned its place as one of the Soviet Union’s ‘hero’ cities in WW2.

Belarus would have been the 47th member of the Council of Europe I’ve visited but Belarus is not actually a member.Along with Kazakhstan its human rights record has kept it out.  My very modest effort a decade ago to help bring new freedoms to its media,along with countless other initiatives to bring Belarus into that group of former Soviet states who now look west instead of east,have achieved very little. 

Belarus has come to be known as ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’ and that seems a fair description but it doesn’t quite tell the whole story.Take my first night in the capital Minsk. A taxi drove me past one of the enormous presidential palaces which Alexander Lukashenko has built himself.He says no Government money was spent on it which leaves the intriguing question of who did pay for it. Just along the road was a modern sports and events arena of the type you see in most American cities and a shopping mall with similar American antecedents. Inside the arena it was pizza and hot dogs,beer and coke,rock bands and cheer-leaders. The top   local ice-hockey team was at home in the KHL ,Russia’s equivalent of North America’s NHL,and having seen the New York Rangers play at Madison Square Garden in New York, I can report that it is not that different when Dinamo Minsk play at the Minsk Arena.One of the Minsk players was even a former NHL man ,Geoff Platt, who likes the place so much he’s taken out Belarussian citizenship.

The KHL stands for Kontinental Hockey League which has 21 teams from Russia and 7 from former parts of the Soviet empire.Having now visited many of the countries in that empire I have found that a common feature is a museum or exhibition condemning the Soviet imperial period.The best examples are the former KGB headquarters in Lithuania where resistance leaders were murdered in a special facility in the basement,the Occupation Museum in Latvia where you are left with the clear impression that the Latvians thought their Soviet occupiers were a lot worse than their Nazi ones,and the Museum of Soviet Occupation in Georgia,a country still occupied in part by the Russians after the Georgians had the nerve to take on their former masters.

It is different in Minsk. At the ice hockey match there was warm applause when the Russian national anthem was played for the visiting team.In Minsk’s main street Independence Avenue, a classic piece of large scale Stalinist post-war architecture ,proudly stands the KGB building where it is absolutely business as usual. Everybody still calls it the KGB and former KGB men like Viktor Rusak, now a parliamentarian and ‘Deputy Chairman of the Standing Commission on National Security’ boasts in his CV that he is a ‘KGB honored security officer’ and lists his former roles in the KGB.

Along the road from the KGB is the Ministry of Justice’s ‘Department on Personnel and Ideology’ ,one of whose roles,according to its website,is ‘enforcement of regulatory and other acts of higher bodies on ideological issues’. It is said to be devoting more of its time to making sure bloggers in Belarus understand  the enforcement of ‘ideological issues’. I was told the biggest threat to a blogger is that he or she becomes so popular that they are deemed to have fallen into the category of  official media and become fully state-controlled.

Nearly two years ago Andrei Khrapavitski summed up in his belarusblog what I found to be still  the mood in Minsk: 

The last year in my home country could be summed up with one word “crisis.” It was the year of unprecedented weakness of Lukashenko. It was the year of awakening for many people who had previously kept silent . It was the year when many of us hoped the regime would fall by the end of the year.It’s 2012, and Lukashenko is still in power. 

Since then Belarus has had an election of a kind in September 2012 and at the end of 2013 Lukashenko is still in power.According to official figures the three main parties,including the Communist Party, won just 5 of the 110 seats,the rest were all won by ‘independents’ who just happen to agree that Lukashenko is the man to run the country.So although the state controls most economic activity Europe’s last dictatorship isn’t so much a Communist one as a Lukashenkoist one.The dictator will be 60 next year and he doesn’t plan on changing much any time soon.

There are two types of academic pundits- those who make simple things complicated and those who make complicated things simple.Professor Peter Frank,who died on Thursday 14th November,was one of the best of the latter. He became a familar face to British viewers and listeners because of his ability to explain and predict the extraordinary changes in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Peter’s base was the Department of Government at Essex University but after work he had an equally familar perch in the Channel Four Newsroom at ITN in  London monitoring  satellite feeds of the Vremya TV news programmme for any coded clues of new developments in Moscow.

As the editor of a programme that couldn’t afford its own Moscow correspondent I found his train fares from Essex and a modest appearance fee the best ‘foreign’ desk investment we ever made. Peter also appeared on other ITN programmes and on BBC radio.

In a tribute Ian Budge of Essex University said ‘With the Cold War in full swing, Russian studies was a progressive and very relevant subject to develop. Peter was their presiding spirit both in the University and in wider spheres.  He was a strong believer in having personal and hands-on contact with the Soviet Union and followed on this by travelling there extensively, making many friends and contacts. Peter’s expertise was nationally recognised when he became the Soviet specialist for Channel 4 News’.

Professor Budge says Peter Frank was a provincial working class lad who worked as a bicycle mechanic after leaving school, was conscripted into the Army at 18 and on the basis of his O-levels was offered a chance to study Russian and interpret radio communications. He managed to pass the course ,was demobbed with a command of Russian, trained as a teacher and then went on to University.

From what he learned and taught at Essex,from those clues gleaned from Soviet TV and from his briefings with his contacts,Peter Frank consistently called it right as President Gorbachev struggled to reform the unreformable .As an example,take the events of 15 March 1989 where the ITN archive database chronicles the output of that night’s C4N as:

President Mikhail Gorbachev urges the Central Committee to accept new reforms which will overhaul Soviet agriculture and address the problem of food supplies.             The proceedings are shown on state TV.  Peter Frank of Essex University believes that the risk of failure is fairly high since the entrenched interests of bureaucrats are at stake.  

Peter’s humble background stood him in wonderfully good stead as a communicator.He was an expert but one with a common sense touch that viewers warmed to.On Channel Four News we were pleased for his growing reputation and he for ours.A proud academic he was also a good friend to journalism and journalists and we will remember him with great affection.

A note from Essex University: Professor Frank’s funeral takes place on Monday 2 December at 2.45pm at Colchester Crematorium.  The family have asked that there should be family flowers only but donations may be made to British Lung Foundation for research into pulmonary fibrosis, c/o Hunnaball of Colchester, York House, 41 Mersea Road, Colchester CO2 7QT.

This is a paper I presented in October to a seminar on ‘Ethical Spaces :What Leveson Missed’ which was part of  the 10th annual conference of the Institute of Communication Ethics in London:

During Lord Justice Leveson’s long search for enough regulatory and legal clarity and certainty to reform the practices of the press without constraining the freedom of the press, I was on a rather more modest search for an editorial holy grail which had interested me for a decade- when exactly  do reporters ‘cross the line’?

Leveson’s conclusion was based –in part- on evidence given to him and –in other parts –on his own legal experience. Mine-again rather more modest- was based on something one reporter said at one of Leveson’s hearings.

Leveson was searching ,and a year on the search still continues, for the certainty of an agreed regulatory model. My own experience these past two years considering the ethical issues facing broadcast and print journalists through case studies from the 1920s to phone-hacking, tends more towards the inevitability of regulatory uncertainty.

I will explain that and then go on to say why I think there are things about Leveson that others may have missed which made it an important and worthwhile process, whether or not (and who can yet tell ) his regulatory model or a version of it is ever agreed. And my evidence for that is the parable of the canoe man which I will relate later.

My research was conducted in partnership with Jeff Hulbert, an Honorary Research Fellow at City University London. A review of our work in the Spectator said that we were ‘safe and snug in higher education’, I’m not sure those of us involved in higher education find it that ‘safe and snug’.

In my four decades in journalism I had often heard colleagues talk about ‘not crossing a line’ but where or how this line was drawn was never clear. In the introduction to ‘When Reporters Cross the Line’ I explained that by and large  British journalists are not very interested in reading rules that someone has written for them.

I quoted my conversation with one of the country’s most respected correspondents, the late Charles Wheeler, who told me that he’d never seen and never read a copy of the BBC’s editorial guidelines. His own guideline was ‘push it as far as you can but make sure you get it right’.

During my time at Ofcom, I had been effectively the Editor-in-Chief of the Broadcast Bulletin, a fortnightly list of Ofcom judgements on which broadcasters have been found to be ‘in breach’ of Ofcom broadcast regulations ,which have been investigated and found ‘not in breach’  and the cases which are declared to be ‘resolved’.

Jeff Hulbert and I decided we would not repeat that model. We would not attempt to adjudicate whether or not individual journalists crossed those uncodified lines , instead we would use a mixture of new archive research, interviews and story-telling to highlight the ethical issues .Then we would try to draw out some of the  morals of the stories.

The full title of the book is ‘When Reporters Cross the Line-the heroes, the villains, the hackers and the spies’. The subjects of the chapters range from Guy Burgess to Andrew Gilligan, from Charles Wheeler to Frederick Forsyth. We never associate a particular name with a particular category.

It wouldn’t be appropriate today to attempt to summarise their stories though the Observer did it rather well in the headline to Peter Preston’s review of the book ;

Reporter?  Secret agent? It’s hard to tell with spies like us.

From the cold war to Syria, journalists have to negotiate ethical waters far murkier than anything considered by Leveson.

Actually the thought of Guy Burgess being cross-examined by Robert Jay QC on how the ethics of how he simultaneously held the posts of BBC producer, MI5 informer and KGB spy would definitely have been worth the price of admission to the Leveson hearings.

Putting that aside, I think there are initiatives that flowed directly or indirectly from Leveson that will benefit journalism, quite apart from the debate about regulatory models.

Buried away in the transcripts of the hours of Leveson hearings is a useful tutorial. More specifically it is Leveson himself explaining how the law recognises that sometimes it is acceptable to break the law.

He outlined four ‘backstops’ that were available to journalists who were news-gathering and reporting ‘in the public interest’. There were, he said, ‘a number of hoops through which a journalist would jump or not jump, as he might prefer’.

First, sometimes, but not always, a statute can specifically provide for a defence. For instance, under the Data Protection Act of 1998 there is a specific defence in section 55 which says ‘in the particular circumstances the obtaining, disclosing or procuring was justified as being in the public interest’.

Secondly there are the guidelines for prosecutors which Leveson says he ‘encouraged’ the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP),Keir Starmer QC, to set out. These suggest journalists should not be charged when ‘the public interest served by the conduct in question outweighs the overall criminality’. The guidelines offer what the DPP called ‘examples of conduct … capable of serving the public interest’.

Only last week the DPP, Keir Starmer, was telling the Guardian that his guidelines will protect reporters working in the public interest.

The third Leveson ‘backstop’ was a British jury , which I remembered from the case of the senior civil servant Clive Ponting where a jury acquitted him of charges under the Official Secrets Act even though he admitted to leaking key documents after the Falklands War.

‘Finally,’ said Leveson, ‘there is, I hope, at the end of the line, a sensible judge who would take a view that even if it is a strict breach of the law, and even if there isn’t a public interest defence, then this is not a very egregious problem.’

But since Leveson , in addition to new guidelines and reminders of judicial safeguards , we have,helpfully the practical parable of the canoe man.

In March 2002, John Darwin from County Durham paddled off into the North Sea and, it appeared at the time, never came back. He was reported missing, presumed dead and his wife Anne collected more than £500,000 in life insurance pay-outs. In fact he was hiding in their home. He had even allowed their two sons to think he was dead.

In July 2008 John and Anne Darwin were both sentenced to six years in prison. Sky News transmitted a report about ‘John and Anne Darwin’s masterplan’, quoting from emails that the ‘canoe-man’ had written to his wife and to a lawyer.

Four years later, John Ryley, head of Sky News, issued a press release which said, ‘On two occasions, we have authorised a journalist to access the email of individuals suspected of criminal activity… We stand by these actions as editorially justified and in the public interest.’

When John Ryley appeared before the Leveson Inquiry it is fair to say John’s demeanour was not quite so robust. Lord Justice Leveson himself joined in the questioning in a censorious tone.

Firstly, about the law.

Lord Justice Leveson: What you were doing wasn’t merely invading somebody’s privacy; it was breaching the criminal law.

John Ryley replied : It was.

Then about regulation.

Lord Justice Leveson: Well, where does the Ofcom Broadcasting Code give any authority to a breach of the criminal law?

Ryley: It doesn’t.

But no action was ever taken against Sky News and its staff by either the UK’s public prosecutors or the broadcasting regulator.

In March 2013 the Crown Prosecution Service announced they would not proceed against Sky News over the hacking of the canoe man’s e-mails. A statement said:

‘The evidence indicates that the public interest served by the conduct in question outweighs the potential overall criminality… In reaching this decision, we took into account that the emails were accessed with a view to showing that a criminal offence had been committed.

In July 2013 Ofcom decided that Sky News had not breached the Broadcasting Code by ‘obtaining and subsequently broadcasting material accessed improperly by gaining unauthorised access to the email accounts’ .Ofcom accepted Sky’s public interest defence but it also cited ‘the broadcaster’s right to freedom of expression……, in the exceptional circumstances of this case, outweighed Mr and Mrs Darwin’s expectation of privacy’.

What students of the European Convention on Human Rights would call favouring Article 10 about freedom of speech over Article 8 about a right to privacy.

However Ofcom also noted that ‘BSkyB’s conduct is at the boundaries of what is appropriate’, presumably putting something of a marker down to those who might consider following Sky’s example.

Now an investigation about a crime is arguably the easiest threshold to meet for a story claiming to be in the public interest. There may be other stories ahead where the public interest is more arguable. But at least the model has been tested and it has worked. We are now more clear, if not entirely clear, when journalists can break the law and breach statutory regulations.

The hacking affair and the Leveson Inquiry have brought –among many other things –a new awareness that the media can’t just opt in and out of observing the law without some basis. One other benefit may turn out to have an even wider and longer-lasting impact.

‘Transparency’ is arguably the most overused word in the English language but that doesn’t mean the value of the concept is completely diminished.

It doesn’t come much more transparent than an editor being interrogated live on television in front of a senior judge by a top barrister. At the Leveson Inquiry public hearings, the live television coverage and the simultaneous commentary on social media made a powerful combination for holding journalists to account in the same way as they, rightly, hold others to account.

My own conclusion is that nothing will ever be the same again after Leveson and that real journalism has nothing to fear from the transparency and accountability it represented. I am not advocating regular ‘trial by television’ of journalists. It wouldn’t be right and it wouldn’t be needed. I believe that the outside possibility of being questioned in public, the possible chance of the disclosure of internal emails (as reinforced by the disclosures to both the Hutton Inquiry and the Pollard review for the BBC of the Savile affair), and the likelihood of peer review on social media have changed behaviours and will continue to do so.

Those who believe they can meet the public interest should have nothing to fear.

So I commend one new ‘line’ and I call it the ‘Leigh line’ after the former investigations editor of The Guardian, David Leigh, who said at a Leveson hearing:

‘I think I would say a journalist ought to be prepared to face up to the consequences of what they’ve done. I mean, if I do something that I think is OK in the public interest, I have to be prepared to take the consequences.’

It was, according to a BBC Radio Four programme in November 2013 , ‘a forgotten piece of broadcasting history, the first woman to present the news on a national television service in Britain did not work for the BBC’.

To those of us latecomers to ITN who only joined in 1972, that woman was just Barbara, an always polite copytaster in the Wells Street newsroom. We’d heard that she’d once been an ITN newsreader on ‘Lunchbox’, ITV’s first attempt at daytime television back in 1955. But she hardly ever talked about it.

Now nearly sixty years after the event and fifteen years after her death, media history –and maybe some of us too- are catching up with the full significance of the life and work of Barbara Mandell.

‘Getting on Air-the Female Pioneers’  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03ffp9q) was a five part lunchtime series presented by Jane Garvey and produced by an independent, Jane Reck. They managed to track down all eleven seconds of the only surviving recording of Barbara on-air as a news reader. Media historian Jean Seaton  said that judged by the clip Barbara didn’t conform to the  normal stereotype of a female newsreader  which was ‘a small nose, be pretty, not move very much ..and be accompanied by an older, greyer chap’. Instead, said Professor Seaton, ‘Mrs Mandell, when you see her, she’s eager, she leans forward, she’s a middle-aged intelligent woman’.

According to the programme Barbara had ‘proved an important point, a woman could be a voice of authority without upsetting the audience’

Barbara’s importance is also acknowledged by Suzanne Franks, author of  a new book ‘Women and Journalism’. Nearly two decades after Barbara’s first broadcast on ITV the BBC  still had what Professor Franks calls ‘a wide range of hostility towards women in the corporation’

She quotes from an internal BBC report from 1973:

On the prospect of female newsreaders it quoted a senior manager observing how ‘women have class bound voices unsuitable for news reading . . . [and] may introduce emotion’. On the possibility of hiring women reporters it noted that women would be ‘unable to work in the cold and wet . . . and (are) not able to make overnight stays on location with a man as wives would not like it’. Another senior male editor, commenting on the prospect of employing female reporters, said that ‘although he had interviewed many women for reporter jobs he had “never found any woman with the remotest chance of working in that capacity” . . . he believes that women are simply not able to do hard news stories .

An online search through the ITN Source archive database shows that Barbara was also significant for her role as a hard news reporter. The lunchtime news only lasted a few months before it was dropped for financial reasons, but Barbara had already proved her worth as a reporter and she focused on that.

The database shows that on 30^th September 1955 she interviewed a man called Fred Russell on his 93^rd birthday about the possibility of making it to 100,which was obviously less common then than it is now.

That transmission would have made Barbara the first female television reporter on air but for the fact that the database shows that the day before Lynne Reid Banks (later a successful novelist) had interviewed a boxer who had just got engaged.

Barbara did a wide range of interviews with people in the news and went on to do reporter packages on Paris fashion shows in the sixties.

She retired in 1980 and wrote travel books and made travel films with her partner, former  ITN cameraman Martin Gray. She had been divorced from Alan Mardell, better known as the broadcaster Alan Dell.

ITN is entitled to feel pride that a woman read the news a full 20 years before Angela Rippon became the BBC ‘s first permanent woman news reader. But maybe that pride should be tempered by the realization that it was 23 years after Barbara’s lunchtime news before Anna Ford joined the company as what was widely described in 1978 as ‘ITN’s first female newsreader’.

Victoria was one of a group of women reporters hired by Nigel Ryan in the early seventies and was sent to cover the Vietnam war. She told me that afterwards she decided she wanted to go back to newspapers and she also wanted to go back to Vietnam, so she became the resident correspondent there for The Times. She went on to become a foreign editor at the Guardian and is a now a journalist and author specializing in ‘the war on terror’.

I count myself as being in what Chris Mullin would call ‘the foothills’ of Sir David Frost’s acquaintancies. For example I was among those guests for his summer garden party who would arrive nervous that he would have no idea who we were or why on earth he had invited us.I needn’t have worried.Whether or not he remembered,his legendary charm got both of us through the encounter without stress.

And so it was in all our professional dealings. But just to show that none of us is perfect I can also remember a Sunday morning in 1991 when we were on very opposing sides.

We were both working for the same channel,Channel 3 in the UK.But such was the bizarre structure  that I was the editor of the channel’s news service for for twenty and a half hours each day,the ITN News on ITV,and he was one of the founding presenters of the news service for three and a half hours each breakfast time,on the separate franchise TVAM.

During the Gulf War of 1991 ITN kept a correspondent,Brent Sadler,and crew in the Iraqi capital,Baghdad ,despite constant pressure from John Major’s Government to withdraw.A number of people who should have known better called me privately to add to that pressure.We did not change our mind.Newspapers ,like the Mail on Sunday,who did not have their own person in Baghdad, asked us to get Sadler to write for them and displayed those articles prominently.

But then the Mail on Sunday seemed to change sides.They ran an article attacking television as ‘a messenger for Saddam’s lies’.According to the paper television was ‘ a poor medium for news.It corrupts the intellect.It destroys real debate’. The Mail characterised the previous week’s TV coverage from Baghdad as ‘they had war in all its brutality.And how they loved it’.

David’s response was not to stand up for television but to join in the criticism. After one of ITN’s many overnight programmes on the progress of the war,he opened his  Sunday show on TVAM by proudly announcing  that TVAM did not have a correspondent in Baghdad.I cannot remember any other TV station in the world  making such a proud announcement  about any news event. The main front man for one part of the ITV system was publicly criticising another part for its commitment to independent eye-witness reporting,

I put it down to David ,with his excellent contacts in Government,  telling them what they wanted to hear by distancing himself from us.

It was a pity because David had been a major part of one of the greatest successes for cooperation within the dysfunctional ITV system-the 1969 coverage of man landing on the Moon. The combination of David Frost and Alastair Burnet ,with brilliant production by David Nicholas of ITN (all three later knighted for services to broadcasting), won the creative and ratings competition with the BBC.

While researching the book ‘When Reporters Cross the Line’ ,co-written with Jeff Hulbert and published by Biteback this Thursday (5th September 2013),I found an archive reference to what may well have been the late David Frost’s first conflict with the broadcasting authorities.

In the archive of the Independent Television Authority (ITA),safely stored at Bournemouth University, is a note from one ITA official to another in September 1960. It refers to an edition of ‘About Anglia’ the magazine programme produced by the ITV franchise holder for the East of England, Anglia Television.The note says:

‘You might be interested in this gaffe in About Anglia.David Frost is not on the regular payroll of Anglia.He is a young Cambridge undergraduate who made a creditable appearance in Town and Gown and was tried out as an interviewer.It is clear that he had not been properly briefed about 3(i)(f).ROA tells me that Anglia have frankly acknowledged a serious mistake’.

3 (i)(f) is a reference to the sections of the Television Act which required ‘due impartiality’ from the ITV licensees. ITV companies started to come  on the air in 1955 but in September 1960 Anglia had only been on the air for less than a year.’ROA’ probably stands for Regional Officer Anglia,the ITA’s regional representative. David Frost was aged 21 at the time.

Also in the file is a letter from the ITA to Anglia Television formally recording that they had breached the Act. The background was that Norwich Education Committee had submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Education asking for funding for a major expansion of schools but this had been rejected by the Ministry. The Secretary of State for Education then would have been the Conservative Sir David Eccles. On ‘About Anglia’ David Frost interviewed the Chairman of the Norwich Committee,a Councillor Smith, and at the end of the interview Frost summed up;

‘Well thank you very much indeed,Councillor Smith.Well the verdict is yours…Is the rejection of the plan by the Ministry a wise step to stop inflation,or is it an act of blind,short-sighted and criminal folly?’

In the copy of the transcript kept in the ITA files,the words  ‘or is it an act of blind,short-sighted and criminal folly?’ are underlined. The ITA’s letter to Anglia Television pointed out that there was no representative of the Ministry of Education on the programme . It went on:

‘When viewers have only one view to consider how can they possibly give a verdict of whether the rejection of the plan is wise or blind,short-sighted and criminal folly’

There was more criticism to come in the letter:

‘Later in the programme in the interview between David Frost and Peter Starling relating to the Olympics, Anglia Television identified itself through David Frost as awarding the second wooden spoon of the night to the Ministry of Education.I consider that this expression,in the absence of a representative of the Ministry,as most unfortunate and quite unnecessary’.

Sadly there is nothing in the file to indicate what the ‘young Cambridge undergraduate’ made of broadcasting regulation.

Here are two pieces I’ve done recently which are pegged to the death of Baroness Thatcher. First an article for the ITN 55 Club magazine which is read by former ITN staff:

If you had to sum up the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and ITN in one episode it would be the night in 1987 that she came to visit the Superchannel News portacabin. Perched proudly on the roof at Wells Street it seemed to symbolize to her a cost-effective, enterprising, commercially-funded international news service in contrast to the BBC’s plan for a publicly-funded BBC World channel. The fact that the BBC never did get that public funding for their channel is testimony to the impact the visit made on government policy. (Pity that the ITV companies couldn’t agree on the future of Superchannel and later sold it to an Italian family that didn’t want a news service). Mostly the Thatcher-ITN relationship was based on people. Gordon Reece was a television producer who’d worked at ITN and other ITV companies and became her adviser on all things television. Apart from his advice on how she should look and sound, it was his idea that during election campaigns she should focus as much on photo-opportunities as she should on the speeches which until then had been the staple diet of TV news at election time. I remember the day he came to ITN and told us his plan. From that meeting grew our idea of so-called ‘target teams’, three or four person units who would each follow a party leader and provide not just the pictures that Reece and his counterparts laid on but also insider analysis. Michael Brunson was to be our target team reporter on that famous 1979 photo-op as Margaret Thatcher cuddled a calf. But it wasn’t just an ex-ITN man that provided a link between Downing Street and Wells Street. Alastair Burnet had always been close to her predecessor as Conservative Party leader, Ted Heath. Despite that, rather than because of that, he had good contacts with the next Tory at Number Ten. Sue Tinson also had contacts there and received a damehood in the Thatcher resignation honours list. She remained a close friend for many years and ensured that when Lady Thatcher gave her first interview after leaving power it was to Michael Brunson. To those who wondered if ITN and the Thatcher Government were too close at times my view, as somebody who was never that close, was that the relationship never strayed into pro-Tory bias. But undoubtedly that’s how it looked to the up and coming New Labour spin doctors like Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell. Or how they chose to see it.

It was called ‘A Service of Thanksgiving Celebrating the Lives of Terry Lloyd,Frederic Nerac,Hussein Osman and Gaby Rado’. The organisers,ITN, didn’t call it a memorial service,probably because Fred Nerac’s body has never been found therefore officially he is ‘missing’. There was thanksgiving for their lives but so emotional was the event that at times it felt like a delayed funeral. Ten years may have passed but for many of those at the journalists’ church,St Bride’s in Fleet Street, those sad days in Iraq felt more recent,much more recent, than that.

I have attended many sad services at St Bride’s,at one the then rector invited me to come back ‘for the events we do other than memorial services’ .But undoubtedly this was the most moving. That’s partly because four men were lost ,three in one incident and one in another,partly because Fred is still missing,but mostly because six children of the men were there and,ten years after their father’s deaths or disappearance ,were old enough to take a full part  in the service.

Fred Nerac’s daughter Camille and his son Alexandre (himself a news cameraman) read letters to their father they had written for the service and Terry Lloyd’s daughter Chelsey gave a reading.At the end of the service they were joined by Chelsey’s brother Oliver, and by Gaby Rado’s sons, Tom and Louis, to light candles in the heart of the church. A  clip of Hussein Osman with his son was included in a video tribute.

The four men’s former colleagues also took part in the service. ITV News’s Bill Neely,who had hired Fred as a video editor/cameraman for the Brussels bureau,gave an address as did Martin Geissler who remembered his ‘mentor’,Terry Lloyd. From Channel Four News Lindsey Hilsum  read a Shakespeare sonnet in memory of Gaby Rado and Lindsay Taylor imagined a phone call to his old friend recalling memories and recapping the missed events of the last ten years.

The Editor of ITV News ,Deborah Turness,sat next to Fred’s wife Fabienne who she had helped through the trauma ten years ago,and read ‘Memorial’ by James Fenton. The wonderful St Bride’s Choir ended the service with  their own interpretation of ‘I know him so well’.

The congregation who comprised all facets of the ‘ITN family’ past and present and  included some of the ITN diaspora now working at the BBC and Sky News went round the corner for a drink and talked about a special night and some very special fallen colleagues.

On the 22^nd March 2003 ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd died on the outskirts of Basra as coalition troops advanced on Iraq’s second city. The post-mortem showed he was killed by ammunition fired by  American troops and Iraqi forces. It was the first time an ITN reporter had been killed in a combat zone and remains the heaviest loss of life among any British television team. One of Terry’s crew, Frederic Nerac, and his translator, Hussein Osman, were also killed .

The tenth anniversary is a reflective moment for those of us who worked with them and specifically those of us  who commissioned their journey to the front line. I was the Chief Executive and Editor-in-Chief of ITN. Primarily we remember the men and their families. ITV has shown a documentary made by ITN Productions in which ITV News anchor Mark Austin accompanied Terry’s daughter Chelsey to Iraq and America to make ‘Who Killed My Dad –the Death of Terry Lloyd’. Some of us will gather with Chelsey at Terry’s local to remember his bravery and his humour.ITN correspondent Bill Neely wrote movingly in the Observer of Fred Nerac who was one of his crew in the Brussels bureau at that time. ITN has organized an event at the journalists’ church, St Bride’s in Fleet Street, to mark the death of not just Terry, Fred and Hussein but also Gaby Rado of Channel Four News who died in Northern Iraq just one week later. In that church there is a list of the media who died in that war that includes Richard Wild a young journalist who worked at ITN during that war and afterwards went to Baghdad as a freelance and was shot dead in the street.

Therefore it might seem odd in these circumstances to add a further special mention for the man who gave the first order for American troops to open fire at Terry and his team.

Back on that Saturday morning in March 2013 those of us at ITN headquarters feared Terry and his team had died when we got the first reports back from the only survivor among the crew, cameraman Daniel Demoustier.

We knew that night that Terry was dead when we saw Al Jazeera footage of his body being taken into a mortuary in Basra. But we didn’t know what had caused his death and we had no idea what had happened to Fred and Hussein. Were they dead too? Perhaps they were still alive in the hands of the Iraqis. The American authorities initially denied, in writing, that their troops were even in the relevant area at the time. It became clear very soon that the British authorities weren’t going to do much to help.

Being the junior partner in a wartime coalition left the British more concerned about upsetting their allies than finding the truth about the incident. And it probably didn’t help our cause that the missing men weren’t British passport holders but just employees of a British company.

The fact that more information was eventually discovered, though sadly it was mostly confirmation of bad news, was down to two women journalists at ITN.

The first was ITN producer Glenda Gaitz who we sent to Basra and, taking many more risks than we or she realized at the time, searched the city for any signs of her missing colleagues. With fellow producer Nick Walshe and ex-SAS men we had hired, she put up missing person posters, hired translators to check every hospital and they even arranged for DNA swabs to be taken from mortuaries and graves for any sign of the missing men. The DNA tests led to the discovery of Hussein’s body but Fred’s body has never been found. Glenda also managed to track down an American officer who witnessed what had happened. He explained that soldiers had seen an armed Iraqi vehicle coming towards them , feared for their own safety, and opened fire not realizing that the vehicle alongside the Iraqis was an ITN car driven by Daniel with Terry alongside him in the passenger seat. The Iraqis fired back and Terry was hit. Glenda also found the Iraqi driver of a minibus who put Terry and other injured people on board to drive them to hospital .He reported that the Americans had opened fire on his makeshift ambulance.

Glenda handed over her evidence to the British military police where Major Kay Roberts had been the sole internal voice trying to get enough resources from her MoD masters to help.

In 2006 a British coroner recorded a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ by American troops. The American military had refused to take part in the proceedings just as they had at any inquest into any British death in that war in which they had been involved.

As Mark Austin wrote this month  in a preview of his anniversary film: ‘the American authorities blocked and stalled, British prosecutors ruled there was insufficient evidence to take the matter any further and there have been no trials, no courts martial and no closure’.

ITN correspondent Penny Marshall set out to find more about the American troops who were involved. Through sustained journalistic enterprise she worked out that US Marine Lieutenant Vince Hogan was the commander of Red Platoon, Delta Company, on that day. He had given the order to open fire. Then she set about finding him. From the moment that Penny located Hogan in his home town he has never sought to avoid responsibility for what he did. When the idea of an anniversary film was mooted ITN asked if he would agree to meet Terry’s daughter Chelsey. He helped to provide her with a better understanding of what happened and why he had given the first order to open fire as the vehicles came towards him.

But he said he knew nothing of the shooting at the makeshift ambulance with the injured on board when it set off  in the opposite direction, away from his troops, towards the nearest hospital.Indeed he said he did not know it had happened.

Perhaps most importantly Lieutenant Hogan seems to have provided closure of a kind for Chelsey Lloyd.

As Mark Austin recorded after that meeting: “Chelsey, no longer consumed by a desire for vengeance, hugged Hogan before he left.As Chelsey and I walked from the coffee shop, I asked her whether the meeting had changed things for her .

“He was a good man, a nice man,” she said. “And I think I know why he did what he did.”

Mark continued:’She still doesn’t know exactly who killed her Dad. But ten years on she has some answers, she has some peace and she has a little more understanding.And that, for Chelsey, is something.’

Sadly there is no such comfort or closure for Fred Nerac’s wife Fabienne . With no clear evidence of what happened to her husband she kept a hope alive that perhaps one day he might be found alive. Eventually she had to give up that hope but maybe one day she,like Chelsey Lloyd ,will get some peace,some answers as to what happened on that day outside Basra ten years ago.

‘When Reporters Cross the Line’ is the title of a book which I am currently completing with a colleague,Jeff Hulbert. It will be published by Biteback in August.This enterprise partly explains the lack of blogs on this site recently.

One of the undrawn lines in journalism is what risks are worth taking in pursuit of a story.

As part of my research I have been listening to an interview which John Simpson,World Affairs Editor of the BBC,gave on 16th January to a former BBC Foreign Editor,Vin Ray, at the Frontline Club in London. The audio is available on a Frontline Club podcast on itunes.

I have transcribed a section of the interview in which Vin Ray asks about safety issues in dangerous places.

VIN RAY:

Do you have any kind of policy when it comes to safety,how do you make that judgement about what to do?

JOHN SIMPSON:‘I do but it sounds so self- regarding, I’m a bit embarrassed to say it but I’ve learned two things,only two things in my career,one is just to keep on going and manifestly I have done that but the other thing is when you are in these kinds of situations,get in there, just absolutely get in there,get closer to it…Sometimes your colleagues aren’t as enthusiastic and as willing as you may be,but what I feel about it is..

VIN RAY:you don’t worry about putting your colleagues lives by ‘getting in there’?

JOHN SIMPSON : I,I,no, no I don’t, because they are there to do a job, just as I am, I wouldn’t let them,I really,really wouldn’t let them go ahead of me or go to places where I’m not prepared to go,certainly I would think that was the most disgusting way of behaving but you know,the only point of being somewhere like that is to show people back home and around the world what is really going on.The cameraman,whoever else may be there knows that and that’s why they are there and it’s a duty which I think you don’t abrogate and I just think that you’ve got to get stuck in and if you don’t get stuck in you don’t get the pictures, and if you don’t get the pictures you’re not doing the job,and if you’re not doing the job,you’re not telling people what is really,really happening.You know nobody has to do this, you can be the Arts Correspondent, you can specialize, nobody in the BBC –I mean God you know as Foreign Editor of the BBC-sometimes its really difficult to drag people out of the BBC’s embrace,to get to dangerous places,so many people coming up to them and saying you don’t need to go if you don’t want to and don’t ,you know sometimes you really got to kind of grit your teeth and get  out of the bloody place because they want you to, they give you far too many chances I think to back out but that’s what I think. The cameraman, the kind of cameraman that I work with are people that understand that,I wouldn’t take anybody to anything that didn’t understand the problem and wasn’t prepared to do it. I wouldn’t look down on them,I wouldn’t criticise them, everybody has got a right to say this is a line beyond which I am not going to go but you are paid to do the job, you are paid to tell people what’s happening, then you got to do it.’