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Here our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, who has spent 23 years with the BBC, and 38 years in journalism, shows how the war in Ukraine has focused attention on the importance of having a free media, otherwise important information like that revealed by The Eye might not have been brought out into the open.
Earlier he has described how he was helped to break into the South Wales Echo office car when he was a cub reporter, recalled his early career as a journalist, the importance of experience in the job, and making clear that the ‘calls’ to emergency services as well as court cases are central to any media operation.
He has also explored how poorly paid most journalism is when trainee reporters had to live in squalid flats, the vital role of expenses, and about one of his most important stories on the now-scrapped 53 year-old BBC Cymru Wales TV Current Affairs series he presented for 10 years, Week In Week Out (WIWO), which won an award even after it was axed, long after his career really took off.
Phil has explained too how crucial it is actually to speak to people, the virtue of speed as well as accuracy, why knowledge of ‘history’ is vital, how certain material was removed from TV Current Affairs programmes when secret cameras had to be used, and some of those he has interviewed.
He has also disclosed why investigative journalism is needed now more than ever although others have different opinions, and how information from trusted sources is crucial at this time.
One of the few positive things to have come out of the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, has been how it has put centre stage the fact that the aggressor has clamped down in an unbelievable way on a free, inquiring media like the equivalents of The Eye in Wales.
Sadly the terrible facts about the disastrous war, are revealed largely OUTSIDE Russia, and invariably only by word of mouth within it (although some details are now coming out).
The Russian President Vladimir Putin, marked more than two decades in power, with the state now controlling the country’s television channels, newspapers, as well as radio stations.
The Kremlin gives editors and producers, metodichki (guidance), on what to cover and how.
The independent television station NTV, was effectively put under Mr Putin’s control, after it had aired a satirical show called Kukly (‘Puppets’), which depicted him as a dwarf.
Officials also try to control the conversations of people online by leaning on social media networks and news aggregators.
Unco-operative digital media companies are blocked or undermined, and popular social media platforms (such as the messaging app Telegram), are flooded with state-approved content.
Even so, uncomfortable (for the Kremlin) truths are still, sometimes, revealed.
Attempts made on the state television show 60 minutes last week, to stop a critic of the war, Mikhail Khodorenok (a retired General), by the presenter Olga Skabeyeva (who is known as the ‘iron doll of Putin TV’), were totally unsuccessful.
She could not stop him saying: “The whole world is against us. (Things are) not true”.
This awful landscape has been made worse, too, since the war began (which Mr Putin insists on calling ‘a special military operation’) on February 24.
Censorship laws bar reporting that cite unofficial sources. Calling the war a ‘war’ is a crime, and protesters are arrested for holding up signs with eight asterisks, which represent the number of letters in Russian for ‘no to war’.
Meanwhile the last remaining influential independent media bastions have been pushed off air.
Dozhd, an online television station, has suspended its streams and been labelled a ‘foreign agent’, Novaya Gazeta, a liberal newspaper whose Editor recently won the Nobel Peace Prize has halted publication, and Echo Moskvy, a popular left-leaning radio station, no longer broadcasts from its longtime Moscow home.
The situation is little better for the media inside Russia’s allies such as China, which says it has a “rock solid friendship” with the invader, and is also responsible for an appalling attack on a free media there.
Apart from outlawing an independent press, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said cooperation between China and Russia, is advantageous to the two peoples, and Mr Xi has stated that their friendship “knows no limits”.
It appears there are ‘no limits’ either to proscribing inquiring media like The Eye.
At least the war in Ukraine has exposed that. Unfortunately…
Publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – how a Welsh football supporters’ band which declared about a UK Government minister, “Go fuck yourself you Tory bastard“, but were to have been used in a performance by the BBC (which officials claimed was “Suitable for all ages”), have again used foul language on social media, and condemned a TV personality for offering a holiday home to a Ukrainian family.
