Reporting the resilience of heroes

Press, 5 March 1988, Page 23

Reporting the resilience of heroes

Heroes. By John Pilger. Pan, 1987. 594 pp. Photograph?. $15.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Bruce Rennie) In June, 1968, John Pi ger, then a reporter for the London tabloid the “Daily Mirror," was at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, part of the huge, tumultuous crush of people Senator Bobby Kennedy's triumphant' victory in the California presidential primary that day. The hotel ballroom was' jammed with a joyously celebrating crowd. Security was minimal. There were no police, and journalists were able to pick up “accreditation" simply by pinning on a name tag. Bobby Kennedy, despised protection anyway and his...only bodyguards were two friends, an enormous for Tier gridiron football star and a former F. 8.1. agent. As the results continue 1. to come in Pilger and two journalist colleagues watching in the press area were befriended by a young Kennedy aide who offered to get them drinks from the bar on the other side of the hotel. To avoid the crowd she bund a short cut through the hotel’s kitchen. Twice when she returned she said to the journalists, "There’s a little guy in there who keeps looking at me kind of funny, just staring as iff he's waiting around for something." The little guy was a Palestinian immigrant called Sirhan Bishara (Sirhan and, as everyone now knows, he was waiting to murder Senator Kennedy. Pilger comments on this incident."It did none of us credit — those who heard Susan Harris’s words of unease and those who themselves had taken the short cut through the kitchen — that no-one attempted to find out who the staring little man was. If one of us had heeded Susan’s warning, we might have changed, quite I literally, the course of American history.”

lit is a poignant thought, although Pilger and his colleagues are hardly to blame for their inaction in this case. But it is clear from this collection of stories, culled from 20 years on the front lines of some of the most devastating events in recent! times, that Pilger deplores the suggestion that journalists must or should remain detached from the matters they are reporting.

; He refers disparagingly to a “nonexistent nirvana of neutrality” or what another journalist has described as “the automatic habit of noninvolvement in other people’s crises.” It is not something of which Pilger can be accused, for whether reporting from an impoverished coal-mining town in the north of England, the starving wilderness left by the Khmers Rouges in Cambodia, or the war in Vietnam, or half a dozen other places, he is passionately involved with those 1 who suffer.

These people, he writes, are often dismissed as the minutiae of the story when they are really the story. They are often portrayed merely as victims (he says) when in truth their I courage and resilience are, often heroic — hence the title.

The great newspaper critic A. J. Liebling once wrote that there are three kinds of journalist: the I reporter who writes about what he sees: the analytical reporter, who writes about what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning; and the expert, who writes about what he construes to be the meaning of what he hasn’t seen. Pilger falls emphatically into the second category. J.

Unfortunately, his skills in the two sides of the craft! of analytical reporting are not equal. As a[ reporter of what he has seen he is superb. As an analyst of the causes of! what he

has seen he is sometimes less than persuasive. In portraying the people on one side of the story as heroes he is inclined to see those on the other as villains of the blackest dye. In many cases life is riot quite like that.

Never mind. One does not have to agree with the analysis to appreciate the fine reporting that “Heroes” contains. 1 I ■

Pilger ! travelled the world for the “Daily Mirror” when it still took its job of (reporting international and domestic! events to its down-market audience seriously. Now that the “Mirror,” by all accounts, is rapidly following its tabloid competitors into an obsession with showbiz and Royal Family trash, it is unlikely that there will be any more, with his unpatronising populist point of view, like him.