An article in last weeks Foreign Policy magazine caught my eye: Terry Anderson
explained why the world still needed war correspondents. Anderson was
writing about Austin Tice, the freelance journalist recently
kidnapped in Syria, and the dangers of the trade in general when
going to a war zone.
Terry
Anderson? A familiar figure among historians of the Lebanese civil
war; a journalist most famous for a long period when he didn't write
a single word. Terry Anderson had been the AP's Beirut bureau chief
for two years when he was abducted by armed militias in Ain
al-Mreisseh, west Beirut on March 16, 1985. He spent six years and
nine months being held as a hostage by a group answering to the name
of Islamic Jihad.
One
point particularly struck me when reading Anderson's article: „war
correspondents are here to find and tell the truth, as best as they
can.“ He grew up in America, growing up in free speech, Anderson
went on, where the free flow of information makes the democracy work.
Where the proper way to fight wrong is with truth and honesty.
Truth.
A short word, a big word. Democracy, honesty: my cynical me gets wary
when reading these words. I went to the internet and searched for
truth. „Truth is most often used to mean in accord with fact or
reality,“ I found, „or in fidelity to an original, or to a
standard or an ideal.“ Whose ideals? Whose standards? Anderson's?
America's? The Syrians' standards? Or Tice's very own personal
ideals?
nothing
but the truth:Terry Anderson
My
digging for truth continued. „Truth is a matter of accurately
copying objective reality“, I read, „and then representing it in
thoughts, words and symbols.“
„Objective“
is a word I have stopped using.
„Truth
is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally
specific and is in part shaped through the power struggles within a
community.“
Better!
Truth is a construction of the strong.
I
stopped at Alfred North Whitehead and his „there are no whole
truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as
whole truths that play the devil.“ I reached my final destination with French
philosopher Jean Baudrillard who considers truth to be largely
simulated, pretending to have something where it has not.
Examples,
Baudrillard?
„Prisons
simulate the truth that society is free; scandals simulate that
corruption is corrected“ - and here it comes: „Disney simulates
that the U.S. itself are an adult place.“
Ha!
My cynical me liked the last one best. Everything's great in
America! It's great to be a kid in America. Objective reality is
replaced by subjective distortions.
Which
truth is Anderson looking for? Does he, do journalists, recognize the
different cultures, the different political systems that shape the
different perceptions of a subjective reality? Do they search for
(Western style) democracy when they should be looking for legitimacy
of power?
Ali
Hashem and other journalists quit Al Jazeera this spring because the
truth imposed on them by the editors in Qatar was different to what
they saw in the field. Amber Lyon, an award winning American
journalist, fought with CNN because the bad folks in Atlanta wouldn't
broadcast her report on the background and the manifestations of the
popular protests in Bahrain. Journalists operate within a complex
framework of interests. Their interest to investigate is countered by
the political interests of their governments. The commercial
interests of their employers are encouraged by cheques and balances of
lobby groups who want a different story to be told.
Good
journalism starts with the truth – about the many guidelines the
journalist is restricted by. Good journalism starts with being humble
– about the fact that there is no such thing as truth. Or as
Richard Feynman, the physicist, put it: „we never are definitely
right, we can only be sure we are wrong.“ Let's start with this. It
would be more than enough. Right, Terry?
a short version of this post can be found at the NOW Lebanon blog site: here.
