It’s the era of fake news, distortion, lies and media deceit, or at least that is how some see it. There is evidence. We see this virtually every day from Trump’s administration, from people like Tucker Carlson, from Fox News and many social media platforms where fiction becomes fact and fact is lost in a sea of distortion and manipulation. False stories that feed the need for bias and a one-track political narrative. Disraeli, the former British Prime minister, talked about ‘Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics’, and within those borders, you can see everything that is wrong in the Media today, how the story is shaped to fit the cause. And how fact can be distorted, ignored and even reshaped to fit a cause or viewpoint.
It has been the role of the media to reveal, uncover and hold the guilty accountable for crimes and wrongdoings. To keep us honest and informed so that we, in turn, can make informed decisions. But, manipulation can take many forms, especially in these days of Social Media strangulation.
It is, of course, essential to name and shame and highlight all that is wrong and has been falsified in journalism. The issue of a new documentary, ‘The Stringer,’ brings into sharp focus our profession, the rights, the wrongs, the claims and distortions. It’s about who took the iconic photo of the so-called ‘napalm girl’ in Vietnam. She was pictured naked running down a road in Vietnam after a napalm attack. It’s not about the actual event; it’s about who took the photo. Either it was Nick Ut, a photographer for the Associated Press agency, who claimed it and was awarded a Pulitzer prize, or it was an NBC News driver Nguyen Thanh Nghe who, fifty years after the event, claims it was him. You may ask who, outside of our industry, cares, especially with so much else going on the world where the consequences are far more damaging. But inside the industry, it does matter. Claiming credit for someone else’s work is highly unethical.
The documentary is possibly a pivotal point, a ‘Me Too’ Media moment. Where we open up and examine, point the finger and demand evidence and accountability. But no matter how ‘brave and courageous’ this has been labelled by people, by some journalists, and some who haven’t seen it, at this point the evidence is open to question and interpretation. It comes down, basically, as I understand it, to a DNA-style investigation of the positioning of people present on that day. That questions whether Nick UT did indeed take the photo or was it the driver, who was a freelancer?
Of course, there is going to be doubt. If there is a car crash and you asked ten bystanders what happened, you will get ten different versions. What has clouded the issue is the use of Non-Disclosure Agreements, NDA’s, something which is alien to journalism and its pursuit of transparency and full fact revelation. Now, I am not sure if these are still in place but I have not seen any follow-up forensic grilling of the main characters, Nguyen Thanh Nghe, who claims he took the iconic photo, and, especially, Carl Robinson, the sacked AP journalist, whose role in this provides a big part of the supporting evidence. He has given an in-depth account of why now but he has not faced questioning and challenges. His very involvement in this adds to the doubt, having not mentioned this alleged travesty until now, no mention in his 2019 memoir, even though it was years after the AP Saigon bureau chief Horst Faas’ death, and he was pictured with Ut celebrating his Pulitzer Prize. In addition, some notable people who dispute the documentary’s findings have not been included. That rings bells of doubt for some.
Without having seen the documentary it is not clear how this whole investigation came about. Did Robinson approach the makers, did the photographer go public or was he tracked down, why now and what evidence was given to the French DNA scientific team?
At the moment we are a little in the dark because the documentary has not been shown outside of the Sundance Festival. It is not open to the general public as of yet and therefore, not open to further scrutiny. This can only lead to further speculation and conjecture. It would help if all of Nick Ut’s photos from that day were revealed and what about video from the NBC team for whom Nguyen Thanh Nghe was working? This video would help position who was where and possibly where the driver was in relation to them. This would have been a fast moving situation with crews and photographers moving into various positions. Did he offer the photo to NBC? As someone who has worked in teams using locals I would not have been happy had my driver or freelance offered material which may have been used by rival organisations.
The issue of ‘was this a money-making exercise or a genuine platform to reveal the truth’ are also areas which are explored and examined in contentious publications and programmes. This has cost money to make and, therefore, the producers will want to recoup their costs at least. Critics will look at the funding and the reasons. But at some point, as this is such a big deal, it should be made available to the wider public. Knowing some of the main people involved, I know that they would not pursue such a project unless there was, what they believed, enough evidence. However, was it strong enough to make a documentary and ruin a man’s reputation?
This documentary also raises the important and often overlooked issue of freelancers and how they are treated. They often provide essential and invaluable input to stories, especially in conflict areas where Western reporters are either reluctant to go or are held back by overly cautious news organisations. Rarely do they receive credit or recognition. I know of major companies having used amazing freelance video, taken in conflict areas in extremely dangerous circumstances, and then passed it off as their own.
I have worked both sides of the fence, as a freelancer and as a staff correspondent. I have seen clearly how the lines are blurred. As a freelance in 1992 I provided material for the BBC. After a highly dangerous three weeks in Somalia during the civil war and truly horrible famine, my cameraman and I collected shocking video showing horrifying scenes of death, fighting, and starvation in the country. It was so strong and so compelling that the BBC used nine minutes in its flagship 30-minute 9 o’clock News programme. It was used on Newsnight, BBC World Service TV, the Six o’clock news and BBC Breakfast. Michael Buerk voiced the 9pm news report. He littered the script with ‘when we were there’. And he was there, but only before the war and famine had started, NOT in February 1992. It gave the impression that it was his report, that he was there for those scenes. It may sound like a cliché but we really did risk our lives to get that complete story. The BBC, although complimentary to me, explained that they didn’t use freelance reporters on the news. I was given no on-air or caption credit for any of the outlets. A month later, however, when I was the only Western journalist present at the fall of Kabul to the Mujahadeen, the BBC was only too ready to take reports from me. The hypocrisy is beyond belief. Large organisations which don’t want to send their own people but also won’t give commissions to freelancers then say, ‘If you get something good, we will be interested’.
Our industry has not been exempt from fabrication in pursuit of money and glory. However, there is nothing that proves ‘The Stringer’ is this. Therefore, and if it is true, this would indeed be an example of important in-house journalism. So will there be a follow-up? Is this now going to be the moment when the producers and everyone else begin to come clean about liars in the News world, cheats and distorters who fabricated events and their roles in them? A classic and recent example was the NBC anchor Brian Williams, who made up, among several other spurious claims, an account of his helicopter being hit by enemy fire in Iraq. It never happened. His excuse was that he made the claim ‘In the fog of war’. The question is of course, just how foggy has it been In the media? Who has made up stories that cannot be verified or would be difficult to prove? On another occasion, I was one of the few, if not the only Western TV journalist, in Yangon for the Crackdown of pro-democracy monk-led protests in 2008. I was shortlisted for an Emmy. But ABC News had also entered its correspondent for an Emmy with almost the same description as for me, ‘One of the only TV journalists to report on the brutal crackdown inside Myanmar’. The reality was that the reporter had crossed into Myanmar from Thailand 600 km north of Yangon and spent a short time on Myanmar soil, but enough to grab a shot of a Government soldier and an interview with a monk. He captured nothing of the crackdown and the protests. Distortion or reporting? But to him and his organisation they had presented to a believing public that he had indeed covered the crackdown.
In conflicts and areas of trouble and strife it is easy to bend the rules, shape the story to what you want it to be and your part in it. The ‘other’ side is often ignorant to what you have produced or unlikely to go to London or New York and make a legal challenge for fear of arrest. Men become monsters and history becomes distorted as the result of a paragraph or a twenty second line in a news programme. I am not just talking about bolstering the cosmetic enhancing of a CV, stretching it further than the elastic on a pair of xxxl relaxed fit jeans. That is common place as in my profession just as in nearly every other walk of life. We, in the industry, know many who have done this and are still living off the results. We generally know who did what and who didn’t. But if this is the start of the cleaning up of our profession, will the people who told us about the alleged ‘sham’ of ‘napalm girl’ now start pointing the finger at the liars and distorters in the Media who have made gain, and continue to do so, from a past which includes reporting what is, at best, clouded in suspicion and at worst fabricated?