There was a fascinating program about the media held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library last month, a roundtable discussion entitled, “Covering Conflict: The Role of Journalists in the Northern Ireland Peace Process.” Organized by the JFK Library Foundation, the colloquy was a follow-up to an earlier program on covering conflict in the Middle East.
Foundation CEO John Shattuck, joined by foundation directors David Burke, the former president of CBS News, and John Cullinane, the promoter of the forum, brought together Irish and American journalists who had covered the story over the past four decades. The program was moderated by Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen, who had served as the paper’s bureau chief in Dublin and London.
The press coverage of “the Troubles,” as they have come to be known on the island of Ireland, really left much to be desired. Former Irish Times and Sunday Tribune journalist Ed Moloney pointed out that a 1971 law in the Republic known as “Section 31” imposed a heavy censorship on RTE, the Irish state’s national broadcaster, making it illegal to broadcast the face or the voices of republicans like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Although the law applied to radio and TV coverage, Moloney said it had a chilling effect across all Irish media: “Self censorship flourished as a result,” he said. The broadcasting ban lasted from 1971 until 1994.
Former New York Times writer and editor Jo Thomas, who led that paper’s coverage of the Oklahoma City bombings, and who won a Pulitzer for her part in producing that paper’s coverage of the aftermath of 9/11, had gone to Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, where she found that much of the information was strictly controlled by government sources. “I am not interested in being a player. I just want to tell people what’s going on,” she said. So she arranged to live for a week each with two families on each side of the divide – Catholic and Protestant – and then reported her stories in the Times.
Jim Cusack, the former security correspondent of the Irish Times, said he has been criticized by both sides for his reporting. “You’re not a cheerleader,” Cusack said. He told about covering the aftermath of a shooting where the media were told by the RUC (the North’s former police force) that the officers had fired just several shots. He stayed behind to inspect the shooting scene, and counted police markers indicating that 120 bullet casings had been found.
And moderator Cullen said that he and his colleagues refuse to acknowledge a role in advancing the peace process. “American journalists by and large ignored Northern Ireland, or covered it from an exceedingly British perspective, not surprising because most of them were based in London,” Cullen said in comments prior to the program. “Journalists were terrified of being labeled fellow travelers of the Provos; I know I was, and it was a hard line to walk, being objective, fair, and skeptical of all sides, not just the paramilitaries.
“British journalists did most of the heavy lifting – investigative reporting that showed travesties of justice, such as the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four [cases],” said Cullen. “Irish journalists, I’m sorry to say, rolled over when Section 31 was introduced. I once wrote that when Margaret Thatcher introduced censorship laws based on Conor Cruise O’Brien’s censorious Section 31 law, it was the first case in history in which the British learned a form of repression from the Irish.” Others who have been deeply involved in media coverage of the north, including Boston journalist Bob Connolly and historian Frank Costello, now living in Belfast, also weighed in on the issue.
At the program’s end, former State Senate and UMass president Bill Bulger suggested it’s instructive to read and consider what Samuel Johnson had to say about journalists in “On the Duty of a Journalist,” written in the mid-1750s:
“A journalist is an historian, not indeed of the highest class, nor of the number of those whose works bestow immortality upon others or themselves; yet, like other historians, he distributes for a time reputation or infamy, regulates the opinion of the week, raises hopes and terrors, inflames or allays the violence of the people. He ought therefore to consider himself as subject at least to the first law of history, the obligation to tell the truth.
“The journalist, indeed, however honest, will frequently deceive, because he will frequently be deceived himself. He is obliged to transmit the earliest intelligence before he knows how far it may be credited; he relates transactions yet fluctuating in uncertainty; he delivers reports of which he knows not the authors. It cannot be expected that he should know more than he is told, or that he should not sometimes be hurried down the current of a popular clamour.
“All that he can do is to consider attentively, and determine impartially, to admit no falsehoods by design, and to retract those which he shall have adopted by mistake.”
We’ll let Dr. Johnson have the last word – for now.
