In those years on the road, I learned to despise pack journalism. To be sure, it is necessary to know what the pack is doing- but only in order oneself to do something different. I once found myself in a flaming row with a rival correspondent in the Falklands who thought it unfair that I was catching a ride on an army helicopter to which he supposed himself entitled. He said, among less quotable things: ‘it’s my turn’. I said that I recognised no turns save devil take the hindmost. It will always suit some journalists to pool a story, to share goodies around with the lads and ladettes. But anybody who wants to prosper, to reach for stardom, ploughs his or her own furrow, and accepts the price in unpopularity.
I learned a huge amount from Charles Wintour. For instance, almost no story tagged ‘exclusive’ is likely to be both original and true. ‘Any newspaper campaign’, he said, ‘should be winnable as well as popular’. Any reader who writes letters to newspapers is, ipso facto, a candidate for secure accommodation. Charles, even in his fifties, retained an infectious boyish enthusiasm for the story of the day, or even for the Londoner’s Diary lead of the day. He was snobbish, nepotistic, and played shameless favourites, which worked to my advantage at the cost of a malicious rumour on the news desk that I was his illegitimate offspring. He cherished his chosen people as an extended family, nurtured more talent than any editor of modern times except Harry Evans. He was rewarded with passionate loyalty from those who gained his approval, and bitter resentment from those who did not.
Among other journalists who much influenced me was Nick Tomalin of the Sunday Times, whom I loved as well as boundlessly admired. Nick, of course, coined the phrase about journalists’ need for ratlike cunning, a little literary ability, and- most important- the ability to believe passionately in second-rate projects. When I rang him for advice before taking off on my first trip to Vietnam, he said: ‘Remember- they lie, they lie, they lie’. So the Americans did, as do all governments, in war or peace. When politicians denounce the deceits of newspapers and journalists, they sometimes have a point. But we would get it right more often if our rulers deceived us with less frequency. When Britain’s prime minister has just restored to the cabinet that monarch of mendacity Peter Mandelson, it becomes hard to wax indignant about the excesses of our trade.
The portability of print is one of the joys of newspaper reporters, unburdened with the electronic rubbish which encumbers every TV man. We have the freedom to compose a story in the back of a helicopter, the front of a truck, a hut in the bush, often in half darkness when filthy dirty and sorely tired. I remember one night riding in the almost empty hold of a huge American cargo plane, down to Saigon from the Central Highlands of Vietnam, while a few feet behind us lay the bodybag of a sergeant killed in the previous day’s fighting, surrounded by his pathetic possessions- guitar, stereo, kitbag. As we droned through the darkness, I found myself thinking about the unseemly struggle in those days of 1972 to avoid becoming the last American to die in Vietnam. There and then, I scribbled a thousand words which got onto next day’s front page. For television, one can seldom contrive that sort of spontaneity. AGAIN STORY Even now, I love the immediacy of tapping at a keyboard in remote places, as I did the other night in the middle of Afghanistan, amid the clatter of helicopters and even the distant thud of an incoming rocket. The prose of many of us profits from the adrenalin kick of writing in hot excitement rather than cool detachment.
The late 1960s represented a commercial low point for British newspapers. A lot of young things like me experienced a brief delusion that TV was the future. I spent two years in front of a camera, which enabled me to explore my own shortcomings, and also the inherent limitations of television. It is an awesome medium of impression, a chronically flawed medium of analysis. It is almost impossible to use it to convey complex information or a nuanced argument. No viewer in the tired evening hours retains any memory of broadcast facts or statistics. The absolute priority of picture obliges a writer to devote much more time and energy to solving the technical problems of illustrating a story than to its content. I am struck by the number of current affairs stars who sooner or later succumb to self-hatred, soured by the frustrations of the medium.
A cynic would say that my viewpoint was coloured by my own shortcomings as a TV performer. I only know that I gain a satisfaction from writing words which work on a page which usually escapes me on camera. I have made a few films I am not ashamed of. Yet in my eyes, even if TV appearances confer on one a fleeting fame among taxi drivers and hotel receptionists, they never possess the magic of that uniquely tactile media product, a new newspaper hot from the press. I am not foolish enough to underrate the internet as a source of information for a new generation. Yet somehow, a reporter’s broadcast words never possess the power, and seldom generate the impact upon the body politic and the public, of a big story on a newsprint front page. To be sure, TV today fuels a manic newspaper celebrity culture. But at the serious end of our trade, it is the broadcasters who often feed upon print. Many, many of their top stories derive from material which they have first seen in newspapers.
I look back fondly on the Falklands war because it offered a last, freakish opportunity for print journalists to dominate reporting of a great news event. Had the Royal Navy not failed to provide facilities for live TV transmissions, writers could never have achieved the hold which we did on popular imagination. That silly conflict was the last hurrah of an era of war corresponding which began with William Howard Russell. It was wonderfully exhilarating to paint portraits of scenes and battles, men and ships and mountains, knowing that millions of people at home were utterly dependent on our phrases for their image of what was taking place, because moving pictures were absent. I would certainly not have become an editor but for the notoriety conferred on me by those three months of 1982.