Among the contenders must be submitting the first draft to the publisher and waiting, sometimes rather a long time, for any feedback. There’s waiting for the first review and later trying to work out if many people are ordering the book by analysing Amazon’s often opaque rankings.
I plead guilty to all of these but perhaps the moment I feared most, and experienced today (5th September 2013) – Biteback publication day of When Reporters Cross the Line – was coming face to face with somebody you have written about and haven’t met since the book was finished.
It happened this morning in the wonderfully swish but slightly Orwellian surroundings of the reception area of the BBC’s New Broadcasting House in London. I had been invited by the BBC World Service programme Newshour to discuss the book with Martin Bell. In my ‘Martin Bell’ chapter I praise the veteran award-winning correspondent for his journalism but am sceptical about his concept of ‘the journalism of attachment’ and whether it is consistent with the requirement for ‘due impartiality’ which Parliament has placed on British broadcasters.
Like many former foreign correspondents Martin has a long memory for those who may have crossed him in the past. As I saw him sitting in BBC reception waiting to record our discussion I did wonder if I was about to join that list. His first words ‘good morning boss’ were reassuringly polite but slightly misleading. I never was Martin’s boss, in fact I was once the editor-in-chief of his main rivals at ITN. But I knew that to the frontline reporters like Martin there was a generic class of ‘bosses’ and I had once undeniably been one of them.
So it was only when we started recording our discussion with BBC World Service presenter James Coomarasamy and Martin got his first chance on air to say what he really thought about what I said about him in the book that I could relax a little. He didn’t dispute any of the facts or opinions, instead he embraced the themes I’d addressed and developed his own thoughts on them. I was further reassured when James asked me questions that revealed that he’d actually read at least part of the book – not something that always happens on these occasions.
Afterwards Martin and I left ‘New BH’ looking forward to our next meeting – at the book’s launch party – and I began looking ahead to my next encounter with a ‘victim’. Frederick Forsyth, best known as a successful thriller writer but back in the 1960s a BBC foreign correspondent, has agreed to debate with me at the Frontline Club in London on 25th September. We’ll be talking about his days covering the Nigerian Civil War in Biafra, why the BBC pulled him out and demoted him and why he went back under his own steam and at his own risk to work alongside the Biafrans.
It is now many years since Forsyth and Bell were on the frontline but the fire in their belly about what they did, why they did it (and who did what to them) burns just as fiercely as it did then.
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