Session 10: REFLECTIONS
Istvan Palffy (MTV Hungary): Hello everybody, welcome to the final session, reflections. As you know leading news anchors from round-the-world will be here to reflect upon the issues and themes of this conference and discuss their takes on the stories of the year. I come from Hungarian television, I work as the main anchor for MTV television news, I am an editor as well and since MTV is your co-host broadcaster here in Budapest I was a member of the editorial board to shape the agenda for news exchange 2003. It is a great honour for me to moderate the show because three distinguished colleagues of mine will be here with us via satellite. Sir Trevor McDonald, NBC's Tom Brokaw and Klaus Kleber from ZDF Germany. We start with Tom Brokaw in New York, he is the anchor and managing director of the top-rated NBC Nightly News and author of The Greatest Generation and other bestsellers in the United States. Hello Tom, welcome to Budapest.
 Tom Brokaw (NBC News, US): Thank you very much it is a real pleasure to be here as part of, based on what are been hearing in the last 15 minutes, this internecine warfare that we have going on internationally.
Istvan Palffy: Through these two days we were speaking about four crucial issues, Iraq, safety, current affairs and censorship. I know that you have lost David Bloom, did this loss of your journalist affect you in anyway during your everyday routine presentation and in newsroom?
Tom Brokaw: Well it was an enormous loss for all of us here professionally and personally. I was en-route to join David just outside of Baghdad and I was about to tell him that he had been getting too much time on the air because of the Bloom Mobile. When I got off the plane in a man I got a very unsettling news that he had died of an embolism and it's obviously rattled this organisation down to the very roots of its soul because David was a popular figure here. Moreover he was a very large part of our future and he had done, we all thought, an astonishingly effective job of conveying from the deserts of Iraq to the American television audiences what it's like to sweep across that Iraqi landscape with the Third Infantry Division. Everything from hostile action to what it's like to get through a sandstorm. The very personal stories of the people with whom he was travelling. And he had connected with the American television audience in a way that I have seldom seen any correspondent connect. I think that Melanie his wife has received in excess of 40,000 e-mails and there was an enormous outpouring of sympathy and grief in this country. But none the less as David would have wanted it, it did not deter us from doing our job on a daily basis. At NBC news and CNBC and MSNBC so we got on at the business of covering the war. In fact after David died Craig White his camera man who was with him captured vividly, memorably one of the most intense combat scenes as they were moving into Baghdad on one of the bridges there. So David was a great loss for us in every conceivable way but we had to move on after mourning his death.
Istvan Palffy: Thanks Tom we will go back to you in New York. Now let's go to Trevor McDonald, Sir Trevor McDonald the presenter of ITV's News at Ten. He is in Scotland at the moment so we have him in Edinburgh as you see. You all know about Trevor, he got his OBE in 1992 and after receiving his knighthood in 1999 he was honoured with the lifetime achievement award just a couple of days ago and if I understand correctly it was the British Prime Minister and Tony Blair who handed to the award. Hello, welcome and congratulations for lifetime achievement award. Trevor the question is quite the same to you, through 40 years of ITV's history ITV never lost a journalist now two of your people were killed and two others are missing and sadly and probably they are dead by this time. Trevor, tell us do these losses, losses of your friends, your colleagues in the newsroom affect your everyday work as a presenter?
 Sir Trevor McDonald (ITV News, UK): Thank you very much and thanks very much for the reception there. I can only echo what Tom Brokaw said which is that one feels this very deeply and very personally. You have colleagues of mine there who are in a curiously paradoxical way much more involved in dealing with the loss of our colleagues than I was closer to the battlefront in Kuwait but nevertheless it affects everybody, you think about it and as you said we had been terribly fortunate in the past in never losing people on the battlefield in the many conflicts that we had covered. So it is a great loss which is felt even today, you said that two of our people are still unaccounted for. But again as Tom Brokaw said one has a job to do and you have to move on and do it. Our correspondents in the field quickly put this behind them, not thoughtlessly, they could never do that but they went on to do the job. And again as Tom Brokaw said we captured some of the memorable images of the war. The embed situation for us was a rather curious arrangement, I'm not too sure that any government, any system does this to facilitate a great deal of information to correspondents on the field. But I think what they were surprised about was how much we were able to do and occasionally we were able to discover things which took little time to reach, and were processed much later down in Doha with the Americans had one of their command and control centres certainly for the press liaison operation. So we did see occasionally, some of these were slices of action and one was never able from one position to get an entire picture of what was going on but these slices of action peripheral though they were were extremely powerful it certainly in the imagery they managed to create about precisely what was going on in this hi-tech war. And so as I said the loss of our colleague is of course something we still think about but you've got to go on and move on and do the job and I think that we managed to do that quite well.
Istvan Palffy: Thank you Trevor. We have Klaus Kleber anchor and chief editor of Haute Journal, Today News, for ZDF in Germany he is in the ZDF Bureau in Berlin. Hello and welcome.
Klaus Kleber (ZDF Germany): Hello Istvan a would much rather be with you in in Budapest tonight it is too bad that we have these perfect satellite connections that it doesn't seem to matter much anymore where you are but Berlin is not a bad choice either. Good evening.
Istvan Palffy: Klaus you're just back from Gaza what were your new experiences is news-gathering not as safe as it was before. I'm not saying that it was safe at any time but is it not that it's safe as it was before 911 and before the Israeli Palestinian fighting extended some two years ago.
Klaus Kleber: Well you see there is a big memorial wall at the the Newseum at Washington which is dedicated to the professional journalists of the world and their work and there is er a very long morning wall of names of people who died in action as journalists trying to find out the truth in very difficult circumstances. This has happened all the time but what is different today is the first of all you need to go there with big teams. Frank Kappa could catch his pictures going alone and today you have camera people, producers and reporters going into difficult circumstances. Also, the nature of war has changed, war is not something we you clearly know you're on the safe side now and on the dangerous side tomorrow, the front is everywhere and it is very hard for journalists to assess what is safe and what is not. Our friendly competitive network ARD lost a cameraman from in the uprising in Moscow, Rory Peck who lost his life in a city which was widely considered to be relatively safe. Therefore to get the news and to get the truth has become an ever more dangerous field because the borderline between truth and untruth, between friend and foe is so blurred that it is hard to stay on the safe side. It has become part of the business and those of us who cover the news at the front lines have to deal with it, and it is dangerous as we see again and again. My condolences to NBC and Tom Brokaw, I remember David Bloom from covering the White House alongside him and beyond the professional capabilities that Tom so eloquently described he was just a great fellow and a very friendly guy. And we were all shocked in the community here when we got the word of his death.
Istvan Palffy: Thank you Klaus will come back you. But now to Tom Brokaw again in New York. Tom we were dealing with the questions that broadcasters are under assault by their governments and one reason they said the government say is that the fight against terrorism, it be that individual terrorism or state terrorism cannot be won if independent media coverage compromises the government effort. Do you agree from a journalistic point of view that this opinion, and what is your comment to the point that there is no critical coverage in the United States?
 Tom Brokaw: I was listening to some of that prior discussion, I only heard about the last 20 minutes or so but I do have some observations. First of all I thought there were some sweeping generalisations made about the American media, you know in the last 10 years in this country especially we've had what I call the Big Bang, we have created a whole new universe here. There used to be just the three mainstream traditional networks. Now we've got all the cable news outlets, the internet, all-news radio across the country which has become a powerful force along with Talk Radio. And for critics to make from abroad especially the kind of critical generalisation about how we had been behaving I think really deters from their credibility. The fact of the matter is that you have to take this outlet by outlet and make a critical examination of what has been reported here and in what fashion and in what context. For example one of the speakers talked about the fact that an alarming number of American people thought that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 911 and that he was connected to terrorism. I was as startled by that as was that commentator, the fact is that if you review what was said not just on NBC and but CBS and ABC and other outlets in this country that point it was hammered out again and again and again in our coverage that there was no hard evidence of any connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and certainly no indication that Saddam Hussein had played any role in the 911 attacks. Including by the way very extensive coverage of the so-called memoranda that came out of the Pentagon shortly after the 911 attacks putting Saddam Hussein on the agenda. That was covered early on and we examined what the motivations of the Pentagon were. Donald Rumsfeld does have a daily briefing he is questioned very carefully by the Defence Department press corps there and on the Sunday morning broadcast as a Bill Wheatley my colleague in Budapest indicated a few moments ago, Tim Rosser who has what can be best described as a deposition style calling up former quotes of all the guests who were there including the Secretary of State, Condoleza Rice and others. So I think that there has been pointed examination of what has been going on here. But what happens when a nation decides to go to war or a President decides to commit the nation to a war it is the most momentous political decision that they can make a and it is always a in a tidal wave of emotion. And there is no more important journalistic assignment than how to cover that war as well and all the aspects of it. What's going on on the ground, what's going on the home front and what the political motivations are. And as there is a fog of war I think too that there is also a fog of journalism if you will. It takes a while to have a kind of clearing to get an idea of how well or how poorly we have done. Part of our job is to report on the facts as we can find them on a day-to-day basis and then have a sorting out as we go along. And we are still very much in that process in this war, my own guess is that within the administration at the highest ranks and even in the middle levels there is a pretty sharp unhappyness with the kind of critical coverage that the war has received.
Istvan Palffy: Thank you Tom. Tom Brokaw, Trevor McDonald and Klaus Kleber are ready to take questions from you from the floor but if there are no questions at the moment then I'll go to Edinburgh back to Trevor. Trevor at the previous session let me summarise it this way, we were talking about broadcasters practising self-censorship in the post 911 world. We spoke about the fact that this media environment is shaped by Fox in the US and its unabashed patriotic journalism. Do you yourself at ITN feel at any kind of self censorship in your newsroom and if you do how do you handle it how do you talk to your people about it?
Sir Trevor McDonald: Well this is a very difficult issue but again referring to what Tom Brokaw said earlier I think that in the coverage of this war we were given ample evidence that people were not happy internationally about what was going on. And people didn't buy for a very very long time that this was part of war on terrorism. As Tom Brokaw said that there was no hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with Al Qaeda. In fact, some of the information that we got was that these two bodies if you can call it that, Saddam and Al Qaeda were very much at each other's throats and Al Qaeda certainly didn't trust Saddam at all. And then of course there were these international protests about the war and I had in personal terms are a very good example of how this thing may have started because 17 months before that there war actually began I had an interview with President Bush in the White House and he was talking then about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. So the business which went on in the United Nations and all that after that didn't convince too many people that this was a reason for war and our government in Britain has a great problem convincing people that this was the case. So we didn't really feel any need for self censorship in this but there was ample evidence that people were questioning what was being done, why it was being done. The other reason was of course the business of international legal precedent. This was a pre-emptive strike on a country which had not attacked the United States or Great Britain and that was also a cause of great concern. So by covering the protests which as I say which not only swept London in unimaginable numbers of people taking part in those protests, we knew they were going on too in Australia and in various parts of America. So it did give a a kind of momentum to the general argument against the war and we certainly didn't feel any great need to censor ourselves in reporting what was happening. And what has happened since in Iraq I think we have made the point without any kind of constraint. We report what we see, we report what governments say but we also in our system of government have had the ability to report what the opposition politicians say and there was certainly very trenchant criticisms about the line being taken by Tony Blair. Not only in his own right but also being seen as somebody who was following along in what the Americans had decided to do. So this became a very live issue for us in our coverage. And there was really in this instance although this is a very tricky area certainly no need for any self censorship. And just to add, Tom Brokaw mentioned when a nation summons up the courage to go to war and its men are on the battlefields I think the temperature changes ever so slightly in that people must be seen to be supporting people in the field. And the arguments about precisely why we went to war tend to disappear on the edges a little bit but those arguments are back and very much in the public eye and being debated in Britain even now. There are many commentators who will tell you, this business about Iraq and our participation in the coalition of the willing as it was called rather euphemistically, might have a great effect on the future of Tony Blair as Prime Minister.
Istvan Palffy: Tom, while Trevor was speaking I saw you nodding and I just wanted to get your opinion about that.
Tom Brokaw: Well there are interesting contrasts between 1991 Operation Desert Storm where I was spending much of my time and this time. We had no direct requests from the administration or from the Defence Department not to report something. Most of our embedded reporters said that even when there were incidents that were going to not reflect well on the units they were able to have the freedom to report what they wanted to. Whereas in 1991 we had to go all the way to then Defence Secretary Richard Cheney to keep one of our reporters in a unit with the 101st Airborne because he found a payphone in the middle of the desert and checked in with us and that was seen to have been a violation. We didn't have that this time. More recently however we did have a series of telephone calls, Bill Wheatley was a part of that, between the White House and NBC News because our Defence Department correspondent Jim Makalchasky was in the Al Rashid Hotel when it was hit by a it those rockets at a time when Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying there and Jim got some very vivid coverage and they were trying to suppress that coverage and we said if Don Rumsfeld has a strong objection to this or case to be made he should make the call, he did not, and our coverage went on the air. There are several self-imposed restraints about showing particularly bloody carnage for example, we don't do that. And at this time events were moving so rapidly across the desert that we didn't have the dilemma of signalling in advance where troop emplacements might be because by the time we found out about it they had already arrived there. So I think that there was a minimum, as Trevor has indicated, of necessity for us to sell sensor on critical decisions. But when it did come up this last time in the Al Rashid attack NBC News was able to report fully and extensively and memorably by Jim Makalchasky what he had gone through their. And that was I thought as telling to the American people as any incident we have had about the continuing dilemma of the so-called post major combat phase of Iraq.
Istvan Palffy: Thanks Tom, we going back to Berlin to Klaus Kleber. Klaus let me just give a short overview of what happened in Hungary concerning TV news during the Iraqi war. These factors we were speaking about and which we are analysing censored coverage from embeds or self censorship affected audience shares and they were declining, that was what our surveys showed. What did you recognise in your country regarding ZDF and the German market?
Klaus Kleber: Of course this was one major story that dominated the news and our ratings and indeed it went through the roof because people wanted to be informed round-the-clock on things going on, not only during the war but also before the war. And there I want to reflect on what Tom Brokaw and Sir Trevor said. You don't have to self censor yourself as a journalist in order to get your certain approach to the news, you cannot really leave your country and you cannot leave behind the mindset of your country. A situation that was particularly difficult for me because not only did I spend 15 years before the war as a correspondent in Washington covering the United States and therefore having a somewhat more close relationship to the American mindset. Also my audience knew me as a reporter from Washington and somehow expected me to be somebody who would be closer to the American position than this transatlantic rift. That put me as an anchor in a very difficult position and we realised then that somehow the two ways of our two media in the United States and Germany which are in many ways very close went apart during these critical months. The difference being that America as Tom so well pointed out a was in a different position, it was even different from the first Gulf war which I also experienced in the United States. There this was a post 11th September, this nation had experienced war to a point on its own ground, it was threatened for the first time. And this sense of mission, this sense of vulnerability transcended every level of American society up to the networks and presenters and somehow the way they depicted the news and the way they approach the President, although critical was still founded on this solidarity of the victims. Somebody who needed to defend himself whatever the topical news of the day maybe, whatever NBC CBS ABC or on a different plane filled Fox may report on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and September 11th and be critical. There is always this common understanding that this is something America has to stand together in and the President has decided to commit our nation to war and somehow this penetrated the whole news. Germany was different, Germany, and I arrived literally weeks before the war in my new position here, and Germany decided to be against that war and this was not just another political decision it was something where many Germans and I got tons of e-mails to that effect, Germans thought they were morally superior for being against the war. And this led to a profound misunderstanding or miss communication between the American side and this part of the European side. And also that transcended all our reporting and in all this time being an anchor I had to be objective, I am not a commentator but I still tried in my role as a managing editor to stay focused on the fact that there is a real problem in Iraq and what ever you may think about the American position, whatever you may think about the war there had to be some way of handling the problem of weapons of mass destruction. And the European view was not really addressing that issue in an efficient way. And for that very reason now to come back to today's news environment, it becomes so terribly important that up til today there is no clear proof that this clear and present danger was really there. For many in Germany the most convincing reason for going to war has still not been proven and I know that everybody who was dealing with German/American relations both in academia, and government or in journalism keep coming back to this issue. That apparently the world has been misled on this reason for the war and this again deepens the rift. Although the Government's are back on good working terms again but there is a lasting gap between the American and German and French and others view of the world even in those countries whose governments have decided to go along with America like Italy and Spain. The population has a very different view on this and this has a lasting impact on German/American relations, on German and European view of their own role in the future of the world. And I don't think there we have seen the end of this very profound misunderstanding yet.
Istvan Palffy: Thanks Klaus for making that point the situation was same in Hungary. Let me just go back to each of our guests. First Trevor in Edinburgh share your final thoughts for us. What did you personally learned from the year 2003?
Sir Trevor McDonald: Well I think the big story was of course Iraq and nothing there we are still learning things from it. In this country we have had an inquiry called the Hutton inquiry which was into the death of a weapons inspector called Dr David Kelly. And what we have learned from that is just how this process of intelligence was managed. And several grave questions and grave doubts were raised about how accurate some of these intelligence reports were or whether they work intelligence reports which actually said that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is very difficult. We learned too a little bit about how governments function because the extraordinary thing about this inquiry, it was called by the Prime Minister Tony Blair, and it was given very narrow parameters. It was not supposed to go in to reasons for the whole war, it was about why this weapons inspector apparently took his own life. And what has come out of that is a great deal of how government departments work and how the intelligence services relate to one another. The communication between the intelligence services in our country and in the United States and other European countries. It's fascinating that it has taken an inquiry like this to bring out stuff that we probably wouldn't have heard, certainly in our country, for 20, 30, 40 years later. So we've learnt a great deal. And I think the result is if I may say so, perhaps rather sadly for governments, the result is great scepticism and grave doubts about precisely how these opinions are shaped and how these decisions are arrived at. And I think future governments will find it very difficult to take on another country at war in the same way as this war in Iraq had progressed.
Istvan Palffy: Thanks Trevor. Tom Brokaw in New York what was your personal learning for the year 2003?
Tom Brokaw: Well I have been struck by the fact that we are in a very complex world now it is no longer as bi-polar as it was once, East and West. the nature of threats or perceived threats now come from so many different directions for all countries really and as I have said repeatedly to my colleagues there are no front lines in the so-called new war and there are new rules that are being developed every day both by governments and necessarily by journalists as well. I think the objective lesson for those of us in journalism whether in this country or anywhere else in the world is that just because we have that technology to get on the air in an instants notice doesn't mean that we have to do that. There have been some painful lessons the BBC certainly had its own very difficult experience with the David Kelly episode. We need to learn to take a deep breath and make sure that all the sources have been checked before we rush onto the air. I have said that there is a new law of physics in what I call this new universe, something gets into the air and it begins to take on shape and weight and form and by 8 o'clock in the morning at the beginning of the news cycle it gets picked up maybe on a radio news broadcast of some kind, by noon it's now on the air across the traditional networks and the cable outlets as well, by late afternoon the internet has picked it up and news editors are trying to determine whether it is a worthy of a lead that night. It may not amount to anything. So I think it's incumbent upon all of us in whatever medium we work to remember that integrity really and credibility are the two great strengths that we have and that requires us to be cautious from time to time and to make certain that that reporting is something do we have absolute confidence in. It's not just a race to be first.
Istvan Palffy: Klaus what I your final thoughts at the end of the year?
Klaus Kleber: I would love to continue Tom Brokaw's thought. In order to be credible and to be critical to our own work it is extremely important that we keep a focus on the whole, entire world. Tom knows very well working for a commercial network, we know it under public television under our financial constraints that there was always a tendency to pull back from international reporting because it is terribly difficult and it rarely gets tremendous ratings and it's pretty expensive. It is now more important than ever that we in our little cities around the world Berlin, London and New York understand what is happening in Gaza in Iraq in Iran, what people might think in Sri Lanka these days can have an immediate effect on our lives. So it is therefore important to maintain a correspondents network and to have people, experts on the spot who do not drop in on parachutes and report the minute they land the background of the events at in the country, they cannot possibly know. Keep them there and give them airtime allow them to tell their story and keep the public informed about things in remote corners of the world which we may find out one morning, maybe tomorrow morning, are not remote at all they have immediate impact on our lives. The world has gotten incredibly small and we have to respect that. There is no difference between home reporting and foreign reporting any more and as expensive as it maybe we have to keep putting it out for the consumption of those who want to know about these things and let's hope there are more and more people who will read it and see it.
Istvan Palffy: Thank you all.
Transcript by Tony Callaghan
Photo Credits: Piotr Azia, EBU; Balint Eder, Brill Productions; and Mark Milstein, North Foto
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