The morning Afghanistan's Northern Alliance was poised to roll into Kabul, John Simpson and his seven-strong BBC team were sitting on a hillside overlooking the city. With the rival news teams still struggling to arrive on the scene, Simpson asked the local Northern Alliance commander, Gul Haidar, for permission to walk down ahead of his forces. So it was that Simpson and his colleagues became the first outsiders to enter the Afghan capital during the conflict. They immediately set up their equipment and sent out a live radio broadcast to London. Down the line they heard the voice of the studio presenter, who also had the British Home Secretary (minister for internal affairs) sitting in her studio waiting to be interviewed.
"I don't quite understand," she said. "If the Northern Alliance troops didn't enter Kabul but the Taliban have gone, who liberated it?" Simpson relates that he decided to risk a joke. "I suppose it was the BBC," he replied. At which the minister remarked: "What do we need the armed forces for if we've got John Simpson?"
This new book is very well timed -- next Wednesday is the first anniversary of the fall of Kabul. In fact it combines two functions -- telling the story of that assignment, and setting down Simpson's views on the media and news-gathering in general. Chapters on the two topics alternate throughout. The book also operates as the third in a trilogy about Simpson's life as a reporter, following in the footsteps of Strange Places, Questionable People and A Mad World, My Masters. The first covered his life, the second his travels, and this last his involvement in the journalist's trade.
His analyses of the mechanics of TV news turn out to be the most interesting sections. Any reporter will immediately identify with the problems Simpson pinpoints, but almost everyone will be interested in what he has to say about the organizations he's worked for or alongside. Journalists of all kinds, he writes, are more likely than other professional people to live on their own in a single room, to eat their dinner out of a can, to have nicotine-stained fingers, chewed nails or alcohol-inflamed cheeks. Their numbers contain, he guesses, more only children than any other profession.
This is a very dubious assumption, surely based more on an old-fashioned prejudice against his own kind than actual observation. Nevertheless, Simpson is often an engaging writer. If his TV image suggests to some a certain pomposity, this isn't present in his prose style. He began the book, he relates, in the same cottage on the coast of South Africa's Natal province in which Alan Paton wrote his classic novel Cry, the Beloved Country. He has an Afrikaner wife, Dee Kruger, who produces his BBC TV program Simpson's World but was unable to accompany him to Afghanistan because her mother was ill.
Simpson is adamant that the BBC has no underlying take on world politics. Being funded by government via an annual license fee which all British TV owners must pay makes people suspect that it's the voice of the administration of the day, but he insists that nowadays it never is.
If there's one thing in this book that's slightly annoying it's Simpson's habit of regularly dropping in references to classic writers. He may or may not have read their books, though clearly he wants us to take on board that he has, but in most cases these references aren't really necessary in the context. He also at one point takes the opportunity to let us know that he's a member of the exclusive (because expensive) London Library -- he waves his membership card in lieu of a press pass in a difficult situation in Israel.
But the need to establish credentials of this kind is understandable in the light of his views on journalists in general. No other profession, he claims, has a lower opinion of what it produces, unless it's advertising copy writers. He says that retired journalists, returning to the real world, are routinely surprised at the seriousness with which many of their readers have taken their opinions.
The book is full of both anecdotes and opinions. Simpson tells one story about wanting to film in a Chinese village that had never seen any foreigners. After driving to a place north of the Great Wall, he was disappointed to hear the village head man say on camera that many foreigners had visited them. The last were in the 13th century, he went on, when the Mongols arrived and killed 57 people.
Fashions change in television, as everywhere else, and Simpson remarks on how the violence of war is screened out these days. The notorious footage from the 1960s of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head -- something that on its own did a lot to bring American opinion round to opposing the US involvement in Vietnam -- would certainly be banned today, he writes.
Simpson is essentially a good traveler and likes almost everywhere he goes. Westerners get more respect for their traditions in Muslim countries, he writes, than Muslims often have done in the West since Sept. 11.
In Iraq, site of the West's oldest civilizations, he visits the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, normally off-limits but briefly open to journalists in 1991 following the Gulf War and Saddam Hussein's accusation that American bombing had damaged its treasures. Simpson doesn't comment on the accepted wisdom in some quarters that cultural artifacts are worth more than human lives, but remarks instead on a gigantic, colored Assyrian statue "far better, far more real and menacing, than anything I had seen in any museum anywhere in the world." The door to its hiding place was hurriedly locked after Simpson's astonished glimpse.
This is a very readable book, despite some lapses, and is for the most part forthright and fair-minded. Simpson is full of praise for many veteran BBC reporters, and anyone interested in the internal politics of the BBC will discover in these pages much material hard to find elsewhere.
Publication Notes:
News From No Man's Land
By John Simpson
471 Pages
MaCmillan
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