Frontline Despatches
Martin Bell, famous for his BBC reports from the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, celebrates the life and work of the man whom modern war reporters admire the most, The Times’ man in the Crimea, W.H. Russell.
William Howard Russell (1821-1907) was of all war reporters probably the one most admired by those who came after him. We envy his access and his courage – not only the courage to report from the front lines of so many and bloody encounters, but to tell inconvenient truths about the appalling hardships suffered by an ill-provided army.
These days there is much academic theorizing – maybe too much – about the political effects of war reporting, especially in television. First it was called the CNN effect. Then for a while the BBC effect. It involves governments taking actions, whether to engage in armed conflict or to withdraw from it, which without the pressures of television they would not have taken. These despatches remind us that there was once a Times effect: Russell would not be silenced. He brought down a government.
He was with the Army but not of it. That remains the crucial relationship in our time as in his.
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