WEDNESDAY 4 JULY ________________ Present Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury, B Corbett of Castle Vale, L Eccles of Moulton, B Fowler, L (Chairman) Hastings of Scarisbrick, L Howe of Idlicote, B Inglewood, L Maxton, L McIntosh of Hudnall, B Thornton, B ________________ Witnesses: Mr Mark Wood, Chief Executive, ITN and Mr Jonathan Munro, Deputy Editor, ITV News and Director of News Gathering, examined. Q1 Chairman: I apologise to everyone for the slightly disrupted morning. As you obviously all know Alan Johnston has been released which we are all delighted about but it has had one disappointing effect so far as we are concerned, that Helen Boaden, who would have been giving evidence today for the BBC, is tied up with the effects of the release, liaising with the family and things of that kind and cannot be here. Although we are very disappointed we are obviously delighted that Alan Johnston has been released. There is no question that he is a very brave journalist and we are delighted that he is safe. We now have ITN. Just to introduce what we are doing, this is a new inquiry by the Communications Committee into media ownership and the news. We are looking at issues like how and why have the agendas of news providers changed; how is the way the way that people access the news changing; how has the process of news gathering changed and I suppose the link between this part and the next part of our inquiry is what is the impact of the concentration of media ownership on the balance and diversity of opinion seen in the news. Those are the kinds of areas that we are looking at. Mark Wood and Jonathan Munro, welcome. Perhaps you could just start very briefly by saying what you both do. Mr Wood: Thank you Chairman. Thank you also for the time and attention this Committee is giving to this area which is an important one for us too. Before I do start could I also add our comments about the release of Alan Johnston because we are delighted too and I would like to pay tribute to the BBC for the way they have managed to keep his case in the spotlight over this long period and I think that has helped enormously in ensuring his freedom, so they really deserve credit for the attention they have kept focussed on him. We are all very pleased, particularly organisations like ours who send people into danger quite regularly. I am Chairman and Chief Executive of ITN, in charge of the whole business therefore. Jonathan Munro is Deputy Editor of ITV News and is Head of News Gathering for ITV News, made by ITN. Q2 Chairman: You say you send journalists into danger as well, how do you assess the danger? Obviously you want to have reports from these danger spots, how do you assess the danger to the journalist? Mr Wood: I will say a word and I am sure Jonathan will. I think one of the things that we have done over many years – I know the BBC have done so as well – is to develop a cadre of journalists and camera people who are experienced, who build up their own experience and can therefore make their own assessments on the ground. That is a very important part of it but we constantly have to balance between getting the story and not putting people into unnecessary danger. ITN has a good track record over 50 years of keeping people out of danger but we did lose three people at the start of the Iraq war and that still pains us. We have examined our own processes and procedures since then. We do have a lot of procedures in place to monitor danger levels and to monitor deployment. Jonathan, do you want to add to that? 2 Mr Munro: The first thing to say is that nobody goes into a hostile environment against their will. Everybody who is sent on the staff is there because they want to be there. Everybody is trained to a very high level. There is quite an industry now in training journalists for hostile environments and indeed businessmen and interpreters as well who go into danger zones. All of our staff are put through those courses. They are very good courses; I was on one myself just a couple of weeks ago, they are very well done. We use Foreign Office advice; we contact embassies and high commissions in those parts of the world that we are deploying to. We employ security advisers of our own in some parts of the world. In Baghdad, for example, if we are going in and out of the city (very often the most dangerous part of any assignment is the journey into the place you are trying to get to rather than the work once you get there) we use security advisers for that purpose. In a sense the most important insurance against things going wrong are the eyes and ears of our own people out there. That is why we do tend to prioritise despatching experienced people. Everybody at some stage has to do their first hostile environment so by definition not everybody on every single assignment is experienced but if somebody is going in for the first time they will always go with members of the team who have been in those circumstances before, are wise about the way to behave in there and have an exit strategy which we agree beforehand should they need to leave pretty promptly. Q3 Chairman: Do you have anyone in Gaza yourself? Mr Munro: We do not have anyone based in Gaza. Our correspondent in Jerusalem, Julian Manyon, went to the Gaza border this morning and was actually in Gaza himself about two weeks ago. It is an interesting case study because under the Fatah regime we judged Gaza to be too dangerous to go to, prompted, for obvious reasons, because Alan Johnston had just been abducted. Under the Hamas regime things became rather more orderly for journalists and we did go in to coincide with Mr Johnston’s hundredth day in captivity about two weeks 3 ago. It was a successful assignment. We categorise those as high risks assignments. We use a traffic light system, so that was a red assignment. Every phone call in and out of the zone is logged and minuted. Every GPS coordinate position is minuted. All the information about where they are moving and why they are moving is written down so that we know exactly where people are. When shifts change, for example in the newsroom in London, there is no danger of information falling between the cracks. I have to report that they came out safely. Q4 Chairman: Do you operate what I gather is called a fireman’s system, that you actually have someone like Julian Manyon based in Jerusalem and then you fly him into whatever danger spot is uppermost? Mr Munro: Yes, we have five correspondents permanently based overseas. The nature of news is that they tend to be based in places which can be volatile, the Middle East being an obvious example. We also have a number of experienced correspondents in London who would go to all parts of the world at a moment’s notice if necessary, again taking into account all the safety precautions we would ask beforehand. If, for example, we needed to go to Afghanistan on a facility with the Ministry of Defence that would typically be done from London rather than a foreign bureau. Q5 Chairman: It is a very dangerous business these days being a journalist in some of these places. The prospect of kidnapping is not new but it is much more prevalent than it ever has been in the recent past at any rate. Mr Wood: I would agree with that. I was editor of Reuters for many years and responsible for deployments of a large number of staff around the world and I would say that the job has become much more dangerous in the last five or six years. As you say, kidnapping is in many ways a bigger danger now than the physical danger of being shot. However, there is also an 4 element of journalists and camera crews being targets in many areas in a way that did not happen in the past. Q6 Chairman: In fact it was the opposite in a sense? You wanted the journalists on your side. Mr Wood: Yes, and that degree of respect for the role of the journalist seems to have evaporated in a lot of war zones. Mr Munro: I would totally agree with that. The issue of us being targets now is a very serious issue; it is a very difficult problem to solve. Nobody wants to be in a position where we are not reporting from the world’s trouble spots. It is important for the public interest that the public is informed about what is happening in Gaza, in Afghanistan, in Zimbabwe or wherever else in the world we feel the need to go from time to time. Being targets is a very uncomfortable position to be in and there is no denying that one of the effects of that is that the number of people who wish to go to these places clearly has diminished compared to the numbers five or six years ago who would have gone more readily. Q7 Chairman: I am told that in places like Baghdad, for example, if you go outside the green zone you do your interviews pretty rapidly – ten minutes – and then move on before hostile forces can gather.