More thrills than skills – A half-life in journalism, part 50

Over the next few weeks, allmediascotland.com is to publish, each weekday, edited extracts from the memoirs of Scottish war correspondent, Paul Harris. ‘More thrills than skills: A half-life in journalism’, is being scheduled for publication next year.

AS journalists in a war zone, we were, of course, supposed to be hard-bitten, fully objective and to remain unmoved by the entreaties of the underdog.

I detected a change in that traditional view during the course of the war in Bosnia.

The veteran BBC newsman, Martin Bell, coined a phrase around the end of the Bosnian war: ‘the journalism of attachment’.

Going very much against decades of firmly-established BBC tradition, Bell suggested that journalists should not stand back but, instead, actually take sides with those patently oppressed in a conflict like the Bosnian war.

After years in Bosnia – and much time spent in towns and cities like Sarajevo held in the vice-like grip of siege – he came to see this as a moral duty.