Breaking News by Martin Fletcher
St Martins Press, $24.95
MARTIN FLETCHER is a phenomenon. He has remained one of the star reporters on NBC News for the past 30 years, despite all the cutbacks at the organisation, despite (or maybe because of) his unmistakable English accent but, in reality, because he is not just any old reporter but one who, as this book demonstrates, has all the traditional gung ho attributes of the foreign correspondent combined with a reflexiveness that is, at times, painful to read.
And pain is what has haunted Fletcher as he has reported wars and disasters from Afghanistan and the Balkans to Rwanda and Somalia and, of course, from the cauldron that is Israel/Palestine. But it is pain caused not just by what he has witnessed but also by the guilt of being the child of Holocaust survivors.
Fletcher pursues a successful career, first as a cameraman and then as a reporter while, on one level, following the rules of the TV news reporting game by being the ultimate professional observer and distancing himself from the suffering he witnesses. But, at the same time, because of his family background, he comes to question his own humanity which enables him to watch the suffering but do little about it. As his work takes him from apartheid South Africa to the Rwandan massacres and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans he keeps asking himself: is it enough simply to observe? And, even more troublingly, are we in the media in some ways as much a cause of the suffering as those who are perpetrating it?
In the end his answer is to carry on, to report what he sees honestly and to use this experience as his way of understanding the suffering of his own family. “To thine own self be true” he concludes (with a little help from Shakespeare) and that he certainly has been. It’s a terrific and thought-provoking read.
Ivor Gaber
