World Press Freedom Day

John Nicolson Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Westminster Hall

[John Nicolson (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP) [V]]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ghani, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) on having secured today’s debate. In the heart of Europe today, a brave young man named Roman Protasevich languishes in jail. His face is now familiar to all of us from a video he was forced to make by his thuggish captors: puffed and swollen from beatings and looking scared, he told us that he was being treated well. Journalism at its finest speaks truth to power; that is why tyrants the world over hate journalists. Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, was so desperate to silence Roman Protasevich that he was prepared to hijack a plane and force it to land in Minsk, the capital of his dark regime.

I am proud to be a journalist. It is all I ever wanted to be, so sometimes I am a little bit surprised to find myself here, offering opinions and certainties rather than asking questions. My dad remembers that as a kid, I used to lie on our tenement hall floor and read the broadsheets. Too wee to hold them, I would lay them flat and read them column by column, poring over reports from far-away, impossibly exotic places. I remember reading the fearless reporting from Vietnam, and also fearless journalism of a different type from Watergate. I loved the writing of Neal Ascherson, the taut forensic skill of Brian Walden, and the flamboyant showmanship of Robin Day. Charles Wheeler’s lugubrious delivery heightened the brave passion of the civil rights movement. James Morris wrote about war as a man and then, as Jan, inspired as a woman, writing with grace about her transition.

I have done a bit of foreign affairs correspondence, and I have anchored some dramatic moments, none more memorable than the horrors of 11 September. I was on air when the twin towers were attacked, and had to find the words to describe the unspeakable brutality and cruelty of the unfolding events. I kept my cool, I think, during the hours of live broadcast, but I wept when I got home. Some of the images that we could not show that day, such as the people jumping from the towers, will be forever seared into my mind. However, my work has mostly been confined to political correspondence—a safe place for journalists, even at Westminster.

Journalists working elsewhere in the world have very different experiences. Reporters Without Borders reports that only 12 countries worldwide are rated “good” for press freedom. Almost three quarters of countries have constrained press freedom. Fifty journalists were killed last year, and 387 were held in detention, which is a historic high. Unsurprisingly, the worst offenders are the most brutal, despotic regimes, with Saudi Arabia and China leading the rogues’ gallery. Fourteen journalists are currently detained for telling the truth about covid, and more than 1,000 have died of it.

Not only did the recent onslaught by Israel against the Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip see the slaughter of 67 innocent children, who were killed outright or buried alive by bombs fired by a military superpower that claims that it uses precision bombing, but that same Israeli bombing campaign targeted journalistic outlets that were determined to report on the carnage. Israel—a country that describes itself as a western democracy—used fighter jets to bomb the building housing Associated Press and al-Jazeera in Gaza. No journalists in the building were killed, but we remember that in a previous Israeli onslaught in 2003, James Miller, a freelance Welsh cameraman, was killed by Israeli troops who continued to fire on him even after the reporter he was with shouted, “We are British journalists.” An inquest concluded that he had been murdered, but no Israeli soldiers were prosecuted.

There have been so many killings of journalists that it seems almost invidious to single out individuals, but we all remember Marie Colvin, the celebrated Sunday Times correspondent who was killed when Assad troops, who were almost certainly targeting her, shelled the building in Homs where she was sheltering as she covered the Syrian regime atrocities. Closer to home, it took the shooting of Lyra McKee by IRA thugs in Derry to get Northern Ireland’s recalcitrant political leaders to issue a joint statement condemning her murder as an attack on the political process and democracy. Although Frank Gardner, the BBC security correspondent, survived an al-Qaeda attack, we are forever reminded of the price he paid when we see him on our screens, reporting uncomplainingly and with grace from a wheelchair. They are brave and fearless, every one of them. Armed only with a pen, microphone or camera, they were killed by cowards bombing and shooting from afar.

Of course, as we have heard, the threat to journalists takes many forms. The spread of disinformation through social media, and attacks on professional journalism, are perhaps the most insidious new ones. The lies disseminated by Putin and Assad, to spread disinformation about the murder of journalists and political opponents, to disguise their responsibility for gas attacks and to blacken the name of, among others, the White Helmets, are amplified online by the malevolent and the naive.

Here today, we honour a fine craft. I hope that, whatever our politics, we as parliamentarians resolve to affirm the right of journalists, whether at home or abroad, to scrutinise and examine, and to probe and uncover, without fear or favour.