BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson has just published Unreliable Sources, which examines how the British press reported the major stories of the past 100 years, from the Boer War to the conflict in Iraq. What conclusions did Simpson come to having completed the book?

“I suppose in one way, that things have changed so little,” he replies. “Journalism stayed pretty much the same between 1900 and 2000. New elements entered and technology changed very powerfully, but it always seemed to me that you could train up a journalist from 1900, and he could do the job a century later pretty much perfectly.”
One aspect of journalism that has been analysed a lot recently in books and television programmes (particularly Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News and the final season of The Wire) is that with the ongoing corporatisation of newspapers, journalists have been required to write more stories with less resources. Does Simpson feel that this has had a negative effect on the profession?
“It’s harmed the kind of journalism that I always try to espouse,” he responds. “The first-hand reporting business of journalism, which is what my book is about really, has been very badly damaged. For instance, The Daily Telegraph has sacked most of its foreign correspondents. But at the same time, if you’re going to be fair – and I read all of the main British newspapers every day – the quality is as high as it’s ever been. What seems to be happening, is that against the financial odds, British journalists are doing as least as good a job as they used to with far better resources.
“The quality of the writing, editing and information that you’re getting in the five main UK newspapers – The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and The Independent – is as good as ever. They are probably five of the ten best newspapers in the world, and they might even be numbers one to five,” says Simpson.
What did Simpson make of Tony O’Reilly selling the London Independent to Alexander Lebvedev recently?
“Well, somebody like me is always going to be seriously worried by that kind of thing,” he comments. “But I see that the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) says that it’s a good thing, and that Lebvedev is a man to be trusted. If that’s the case – and I don’t think the NUJ would say that if it wasn’t true – then I think it’s excellent. The trouble about The Independent is that it’s been on such a tight financial rein for so long. We’ll have to see if the new owners are going to put more money into it, but that’s been the only thing wrong with The Independent – it’s been absolutely without a penny.”
In the section of Unreliable Sources that deals with the propping up of Margaret Thatcher’s government by the Murdoch press, Simpson observes that at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, BBC journalists very often had to fight to air interviews with key figures from the Republican movement. Did Simpson himself ever have to overcome such obstacles to getting his reports broadcast?
“Oh yes, that is true,” he acknowledges. “With regard to Northern Ireland, in the early ’70s it used to be really difficult under the Tory and Labour governments. Nobody ever said journalism had to be nice and easy, and I think that on the whole, the reporting that we did was pretty good. I would like to have seen greater freedom and less nervousness on the part of the BBC, but given the circumstances, which were of absolute paranoia in government – right through from Heath to Wilson and Thatcher – I actually think we did quite a good job.”
In the same chapter, Simpson makes the interesting point that the greatest spinner of the Murdoch-as-kingmaker myth is the media tycoon himself. This has again been a noticeable element in the run-up to the British election, with much being made of The Sun’s decision to give the nod to David Cameron.
“Murdoch’s portrayal of himself as being enormously influential has been very deliberate,” reckons Simpson. “I think successive governments since Thatcher’s day have fallen for what’s really a con trick. That idea if he switches his allegiance from one party to another, the party he goes to is going to win – I mean, who knows if it’s going to happen this time? Certainly, his influence has been on the wane. From the moment he announced that he was going to support them, the Tories have been dropping in the opinion polls. I don’t think it was really ever true.
“I think it was something that Murdoch could do, in order to be able then to kind of pressurise the new government, saying, ‘If I don’t continue to like you, then you could be in trouble. And I will only like you if you do things that are in my organisation’s commercial interests.’ As with everything he does, it’s got an eye on the profit margin.”
Simpson himself came in for some criticism when he marched into Kabul back in 2001, and loudly trumpeted the city’s liberation. Does he now regret this?
“I’ll tell you what I do have, if I can say this without offence,” he answers. “Really, it’s only ever journalists who read the file who bring this up. I think that people who talk about it a lot are tossers. But we all knew what it was about back in 2003 – that it was a joke. And as I say, it’s only journalists who ever refer to it.”
During one report from Iraq in 2003, Simpson and his crew got caught up in a friendly fire incident, which resulted in Simpson becoming deaf in one ear, whilst the team’s Kurdish translator, Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, was killed. How did this incident affect him in the long term?
“I don’t think it did affect me in the long term,” says Simpson. “For instance, I didn’t start to question whether I should be doing these things. In the short term, of course it was unpleasant. I mean, watching eighteen people, I think, being kind of burned alive in front of you is not very much fun. But nobody makes me do these things, and I’m not scared of my job. Privately, that kind of thing makes me really angry. At least the people who were bombed – apart from us – were all soldiers.
“But these sort of strikes against civilians and so forth, I don’t see very much difference between them and suicide bombers. It seems to me pretty much the same. And of course, having a young son proves to you the value of human life in a way that nothing else possibly could. In that sort of way, yes, it’s affected me. But in terms of should I go, do I wake up in the night being scared – no. I’m deaf in one ear and I’ve got a large lump of shrapnel in my leg from that incident, so I can’t forget it entirely, but it doesn’t haunt me in any way.
“The chap who died, Kamaran, I have his picture up and I look at it a lot. I think about him just about every day.”