Dying to tell the Truth

People sometimes ask me why I as a Christian want to go into journalism. Especially as every time you hear about the press in the news right now it’s usually in connection with the phrases “Leveson Enquiry,” “Phone Hacking” and “Operation Weeting.” In short, Journalists are bad people. In the eyes of the general public, the entire Fourth Estate is populated with people with the moral fibre and backbone of frogspawn and why would I want to be part of that?

I want to be a Journalist, because of people like Marie Colvin.

For those of you who don’t know, Marie Colvin was a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times specialising in war reporting. She’d reported from pretty much every war zone on the planet over the last twenty years, from Sri Lanka to Libya. She was the journalist who arranged the only interview with Colonel Gaddafi during last year’s Libyan uprising.  She went wherever she was needed in search of not just the main story, but the stories that mattered. The stories that would echo in the hearts of the ordinary people back home.

This week, she died. She was killed in a missile strike while covering the Syrian Governments bombardment of the town of Homs. In an effort to prevent news of his regime’s atrocities reaching the western world, forces loyal to President Al-Assad destroyed the building being used by the foreign media, killing Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik and wounding two others.

Homs is a dangerous place to be, and all the eulogies that have been said have made it clear that Colvin knew that. But they also say that she knew she had to go there, that she had to find the story.  The story that mattered to the people.  The story that might just shake up the world.  If she was going to have a say in the manner of her death, I would say that this is how she would want to go, informing the world.

That’s what draws me as a Christian  to journalism. That power, that ability to change the world even a little at a time. Bit by bit, inch by inch, story by story. For every journalist who is hacking phones in Wapping there is another bedded down with the troops in Helmand Province, or dragging themselves hither and thither across great distances, in search of that one story that matters.

That’s what we look for. That’s what we long for. Every minute we spend writing about a village fete will be vindicated when we finally find and break that story that will change the world. That will change how people view the world and how they understand it.

Yes journalism has a bad name at the moment. But at its heart it is a noble profession, tasked with possibly the most important assignment any man or woman can perform. Uncovering and reporting the Truth. We are truth-seekers and the knowledge of that more than makes up for the few bad apples in the journalistic barrel

“Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that rough first draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.”  - Marie Colvin – November 2010.