-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- From http://www.mediachannel.org/views/oped/whitehead.shtml {{<Begin>}} When The Camera Lies Britain's award-winning Independent Television News is suing the tiny, 12,000- circulation LM (formerly, Living Marxism) magazine. LM claims that ITN's 1992 pictures of Bosnian prisoners � pictures that horrified the world, moved leaders to action and led ultimately to the partitioning of Bosnia � were manipulated. Former ITN producer Bruce Whitehead reports from the legal frontlines. Truth may be the first casualty in war, but the patient remains under close observation, even in peacetime. On Feb. 28, nearly seven years on, Britain's Independent Television News � the largest commercial news broadcaster outside the USA � took Living Marxism magazine to the High Court in London for alleged libel. Media expert Noam Chomsky has called the case "outrageous...a very significant impediment to freedom of speech." ITN is suing LM magazine (as it renamed itself in 1997) over an article claiming that ITN had distorted footage of Bosnian Muslim refugees in a camp in northern Bosnia in order to mislead viewers and give the impression of a prison camp behind barbed wire. The magazine denies libel, claiming that its assertions were justified and that no corporate giant should use British libel law, which some argue is inherently unfair, to silence a small publication's right to free speech. ITN has won prizes for its journalism and retains an enviable reputation for impartiality in war reporting. Yet there's mounting concern about its legal action against fellow journalists who dared to publish an alternative view of a complex conflict. The writers Doris Lessing and Paul Theroux are among dozens of public figures who have expressed disapproval over ITN's action. At the company's sleek offices in London, ITN's press officers used to hand out free glossy calendars to visitors, depicting its famous scoops and exclusives. One included the photo that shocked the world: the emaciated ribcage of the Bosnian Muslim refugee Fikret Alic. ITN was proud of such images because of the huge international reaction they caused when ITN aired them in August 1992. Bill Clinton was so shocked that he called on then President George Bush to take military action against the Bosnian Serbs. Later scrutiny of the footage suggested that all was not as it seemed, however. Two camera crews working for ITN's Channel Four News � Penny Marshall and her team, accompanied by Ian Williams' team � had entered the Bosnian Serb-run camp for Bosnian Muslim refugees at Trnopolje in the Prijedor region on August 5, 1992. They were accompanied by Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian newspaper, and they were looking for evidence of death camps reported in articles in The Guardian newspaper and Newsday magazine. The ITN team took pictures of Fikret Alic, the thinnest-looking prisoner, along with shots of the medical center and sleeping block, and sent them back to London the next day, when they were broadcast on ITV and Channel Four bulletins. The reports described how Bosnian Muslim prisoners were being detained at the camp, having been forced out of their homes or captured by Serb forces. Penny Marshall's commentary noted that some of the men were there voluntarily. However, the report that aired gave the clear impression that these men were being forcibly starved behind barbed wire. The full impact of the shocking images deeply affected millions around the world. Britain's Prime Minister John Major promised troops for Bosnia; in the United States, the images inspired a wave of public and political revulsion which led to the Dayton Agreement, partitioning Bosnia. (Subsequently, the International Committee of the Red Cross would complain that thanks to the furor over the ITN pictures, any chance of a solution allowing Muslims to remain in the area had been lost.) In 1996, Thomas Deichmann, a German freelance journalist, was called before the Hague War Crimes Tribunal as a defense witness in the trial of Bosnian Serb Dusko Tadic. Giving evidence about media coverage, Deichmann found apparent inconsistencies between ITN's "rushes" � unedited, pre-broadcast footage � and the reports which were broadcast. He went to Trnopolje and wrote an article, reprinted in February 1997's LM magazine, detailing what he claimed was the true position of the fence and the treatment of prisoners. Deichmann concluded that in fact the prisoners were not inside a barbed wire fence; rather, the ITN crew itself had been inside the fencing, which surrounded a storage barn for farm equipment. "There was no barbed wire fence surrounding the Trnopolje camp," he wrote. "It was not a prison...but a collection center for refugees. ... In the eyes of many, the pictures left the false impression that the Bosnian Muslims were caged behind barbed wire." Why had the crew done this, he wondered. If it was an innocent mistake, why had they failed to correct the misleading impression that the pictures had given? The answer, he argued, was that the ITN journalists were under such pressure to "scoop" the story of death camps in Bosnia that they didn't dare return without a powerful report. Despite several days of inspecting camps listed by Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, they had failed to find any, and, claimed Deichmann, "this was their last chance to get the story their editors wanted." ITN responded swiftly to the article, serving writs against LM magazine and Two- Ten Communications, a newswire service. Since then, according to Helene Guldberg, co-publisher of LM, the whole case has proceeded at a snail's pace. The impression of the reluctant plaintiff is surprising, given ITN's initial keenness. Guldberg thinks their initial strategy was to bleed the magazine dry in an out-of-court settlement, avoiding any slur on the pictures which shocked the world (and cemented ITN's reputation for war reporting). But Guldberg wouldn't play that game. "I couldn't believe it when I read the fax containing ITN's writ. At first, I found it amusing. Then, when it sunk in, I got angry and was determined to fight it. This is a struggle for free speech, against Britain's draconian libel laws, which favor big companies and put an unreasonable degree of proof on any accuser to make their allegations stick." Geoffrey Robertson, the British human-rights lawyer, has written in his book "The Justice Game" that, "London is the libel capital of the world because English law heavily favors the plaintiffs. All that the plaintiff has to prove is that the defendant published a defamatory imputation about him: the burden then shifts to the defense to prove that [the imputation] is true." LM used to be the journal of the Revolutionary Commmunist Party, but now carries trenchant writing spanning the political spectrum. Selling roughly 12,000 copies a month, it's hardly a media giant; the case could bankrupt its editor and publisher. It's this threat that paints LM in the role of a cheeky, outspoken David against ITN's intolerant Goliath. There are puzzling aspects to the case. One ITN legal statement claims that the journalists did not refer to Trnopolje as a concentration camp. But Deichmann never said that they did. When the term "concentration camp" appears in his article, he is quoting British newspaper references to Belsen. ITN lawyers also claimed that Deichmann's article "stated that there was no barbed wire fence surrounding the camp, nor were the refugees in the picture surrounded by barbed wire." In fact, Deichmann actually wrote that the refugees "were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence." A small detail, but in legal argument "imprisoned" might not mean the same as surrounded. As for the extent of the fencing, all sides now agree that it was incomplete and had gaps. ITN seems to be denying allegations Deichmann never made. Then there is the question of why ITN failed to send unedited rushes of the crucial sequence as part of the disclosure required by the legal process. LM's lawyers asked repeatedly, over the course of a year for the missing shots, which showed Fikret Alic in close-up; finally, ITN claimed � amazingly � that the tape was lost! I worked for four years in ITN's chaotic newsroom. Tapes do go missing, but they usually turn up somewhere. But the pictures that shocked the world?!? However, I did see the rest of the rushes showing the crew arriving by coach from Omarska, entering the compound through a gap in the fence and interviewing and filming people. On the left side, the prisoners were indeed only enclosed by a waist-high, non-barbed fence, not a full-height barbed wire one. But why, I wondered, were they obediently standing three feet inside the fence, instead of crowding up against it, as they were at the higher fence? Could the heavily armed Serb, swaggering up and down, machine gun at the ready, have had anything to do with it? This low fence joined onto the corner of a full-height barbed- wire compound, enclosing a storage shed. Inside this compound stood the ITN/Guardian team, filming the detainees. So yes, they were filming the men from inside their own partly fenced area, as LM claimed. But to suggest, as LM and Deichmann have, that the refugees/prisoners could move freely in or out of the camp was plainly not true; armed Serbs looked on as they spoke, and the men clearly couldn't speak openly. The camp may have been a better option than the terrors of ethnic cleansing in their villages, and they could check in anytime � but they couldn't leave. Another LM allegation is that the tape shows well-nourished prisoners with paunches standing in the camp. But from the plans of the camp, it seems that the ITN crew was standing outside the main camp area, and the "prisoners with paunches" could have been anybody � Serbs even, perhaps off-duty guards. The first four days of the trial have gone largely without incident. I noticed that The Guardian, whose reporter Ed Vulliamy accompanied the teams at Trnopolje, covered the first three days of prosecution evidence, but printed nothing of the defense's cross-examination. Vulliamy has bitterly criticized LM, stands foursquare by ITN, and may be called as a witness. The Guardian and its stablemate, The Observer, have printed several scathing attacks on LM in recent years. They have often been critical of the BBC and other channels such as the documentary maker Carlton, but rarely of ITN. In court, TVs screened the pictures shot by the ITN teams as they toured the tense squalor of Omarska, before the crews had witnessed the terrible scenes at Trnopolje. As the prosecution laid out its case, the uncut footage of Trnopolje was followed by tapes of the actual news reports of the camp shown the next day. LM's defense is simply that the allegations were true and therefore justified. Suggesting a motive for malicious libel, Tom Shields, the lead prosecution lawyer for ITN, pointed out that Mick Hume, editor of LM, had shown hostility to pro-Bosnian western journalists before. Hume had published articles implying that the Hague war-crimes tribunals hearing journalists' evidence were political show trials designed to demonstrate the divide between the west and the rest of the world, and to demonize U.S. enemies. Also, the magazine was being re-launched and could do with the publicity of legal threats against it, suggested Shields. Under cross-examination, Ian Williams told how the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had offered a challenge to ITN to find evidence of atrocities in the refugee camps in northwest Bosnia. A bus trip was arranged to visit several camps in the region, culminating in the arrival at Omarska, where 2,500 men were being held. "I saw emaciated, filthy, frightened men," said Williams. "Their meal was a bowl of beans and bread. ... There was an appalling silence. Terrified prisoners were eating like famished dogs, overlooked by fat, well-fed Serb guards with their guns cocked." But the team was not allowed to investigate and instead was moved on to Trnopolje, described by the Serbs as a transit center. What they found there, said Williams, stunned him: hundreds of men, imprisoned, in a terrible state. "They were in a very bad physical condition," he told the jury, "... emaciated, dirty and very, very frightened. No one could talk openly. Nina [their translator] had lost it and was too traumatized to work. "We knew it was powerful. It was the first hard evidence of what was happening in northern Bosnia. We didn't think they'd let us out with the pictures. But we [the team] agreed [that] they could not be described as Nazi-style concentration camps." Williams described how he saw the famous image of Fikret Alic's starved ribcage as the ITV team played it out to London. "It was a very good shot, which I wanted to include." He denied that he took sides, and went on: "We bent over backwards to put the pictures in proper context because of the power of the images." Asked if it was the ITN crew itself, which had, in fact, been surrounded by barbed wire rather than the prisoners, Williams replied: "That is an absurd suggestion. I was not aware that we were in any sort of enclosure. We never suggested that there was barbed wire surrounding the camp. What it showed was that there was a compound in which men were clearly imprisoned." Questioned by Gavin Millar, counsel for the defense, Williams admitted that one man seen by the fence was also seen at a window in the adjoining building. Yet his report stated that "hundreds of men were forced to eat and sleep in the field." He wasn't sure which men had access to shelter. Millar pressed Williams about the corner of the barbed wire fence where it joins with the low fence. Asked if it was not blindingly obvious that the barbed wire was a pre-war fence protecting the barn, Williams replied that it was not. ITN next called a former C4 news producer, Andy Bradell, who accepted the Judge's intervention that, at some stage, the barn area next to the camp fence had been enclosed by a barbed-wire fence. However, despite repeated attempts by the defense to show that the fence was still there, the prosecution's witnesses consistently asserted that they had somehow made their way through the fence to tour the camp, avoiding the issue of whether they had been filming from a compound ringed with barbed wire. The case continues. It would be wrong to speculate on the truth of the matter while a legal battle is underway in Britain. But it's clear that the case will turn on whether or not the defense can prove that the ITN team deliberately misled viewers about the barbed wire. That may be hard to do, even with the video evidence, because although the camera cannot lie, its performance can vary, and crucial scenes fail to provide conclusive evidence either way. The best the jury may be able to do is to return a verdict of "not proven." In which case, growing doubts over the honesty and truthfulness of TV news will not be assuaged. - Bruce Whitehead is a London-based freelance TV news producer and print journalist. He was a staff producer at ITN and CNN. His byline has appeared in The Independent, Financial Times magazine, and The Journalist, among other publications. {{<End>}} A<>E<>R ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense." --Buddha + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." 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