IN A world of deceit, journalists are among the few independent witnesses to history and to its wickedness, the journalist and author Robert Fisk said yesterday.
"Although the risks are increases the old, traditional protection supposedly bestowed upon journalists decays, I still believe we should be out there naming the bad guys. In other words, I still think the risks are worth taking. But I only use the word `think'."
Mr Fisk, the London Independent's Middle East correspondent, was speaking at a seminar entitled "Seek the Truth", organised to honour the memory of the crime reporter Veronica Guerin, who was murdered on June 26th.
Ms Guerin was not just killed because of her articles in the Sunday Independent, Mr Fisk said. "The real target was to get at you, to shut you up, to get you to turn off the light. And only you know how successful or otherwise were the bullets that struck Veronica Guerin.
There were other pressures: threats, pressures from politicians and pressures that came from editorial weakness. He was not suggesting that diplomats bending an editor's ear or writers bought by regimes were on the same level as killers.
"The lying public relations man is not on the same level as the murderer. But we should recognise, I think, that they all share a common interest with the contract killer at the traffic lights: to stop us writing what they do not want us to write. Maybe it is time to recognise this, to see them - in however different a scale - as being common enemies of ours."
Journalists should take what they do seriously and reject the term "hack". The man who ordered Veronica Guerin's murder took her seriously and took journalism seriously. "Maybe we should take it more seriously too. Because I do not think we can play the role of fools and jesters and then ask to be seen as participants in a tragedy when one of our colleagues is brutally murdered."