Bearing witness is an ethical act. Whether a person bears truthful witness or false witness, the act involves moral agency. Choosing to testify to an experience or event that others, or the established narrative of a culture, may contest may alter the rest of a person’s life. Witnessing is not without cost to both the agent bearing witness and also possibly to the audiences, the secondary witnesses hearing or observing the testimony. Therefore, deciding to bear or not bear witness has moral and cultural significance. Consider the example of two British journalists working in Soviet Russia and the moral and cultural significance of the witness they provided, which shows that bearing witness is not without cost.
In the 1930s, Malcolm Muggeridge, an eager young reporter for the Manchester Guardian, left England for what he believed to be the promised land, Stalin’s Moscow. Muggeridge soon found his hopes for utopia dashed as he travelled the Soviet countryside and confirmed underground reports of the mass starvation of peasants on collectivized farms. In 1933, Muggeridge was one of few journalists to cover the Ukrainian famine, during which conservative estimates report three to three and a half million Ukrainians died.1 Muggeridge did not intend to expose the problems with Soviet communism – he had been a believer in the great possibilities of a socialist state. Instead of protecting his own position, he wrestled through the crisis of ideology and bore truthful witness by reporting on the deadly famine. Muggeridge wrote in his diary, “whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven’t seen this. Ideas will come and go; but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood.”2 Muggeridge chose to “never pretend” that he did not see the Ukrainian people dying of starvation. In contrast, Muggeridge’s contemporary Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, denied the famine in the hope of keeping his privileged access to Stalin. Duranty responded to the famine by sticking to the Communist party line, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”3 Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Soviet Russia’s “five year plan.” Muggeridge felt the cost of bearing witness to a contested narrative; he was eventually forced to leave Russia and the Manchester Guardian. While the 1930s public ridiculed Muggeridge and lauded Duranty, Muggeridge’s testimony is now lauded, especially among Ukrainian communities, and Duranty is called “Stalin’s Western Apologist.”
Muggeridge’s claim that he must never pretend he was not a witness to the starvation of the Ukrainian people carries the moral weight that often accompanies witnessing versus other modes of perceiving or ways of coming to know things.4 Muggeridge’s story, and Duranty’s as well, illustrates how being a witness can involve being caught up in a “web of complicity.”5
In this chapter, I will explore truth claims connected to the claim of bearing witness. The concept of bearing witness is evident within many fields of the humanities: theology, law, literature, holocaust studies, media studies, and journalism studies. Bearing witness is an ethical claim because the social practice of bearing witness is tied to making truth claims. Simply being present or seeing something can involve a person as a witness to a contested situation. Witness bearers cannot pretend that they “never knew,” and in some situations are under the moral mandate to “never forget”; to do otherwise is tantamount to bearing false witness. Communication scholar John Durham Peters claims that bearing witness means “being on the side of right.” Peters compares the memoirs of a Nazi soldier as an eyewitness to the events of the Second World War to an account by a Holocaust survivor. The Nazi’s memoir may be accepted as an account of what happened, “but never as a ‘witness’ in the moral sense: to witness means to be on the right side.”6 There are problems with Peters’s bold claim. For instance, the journalist who claims to bear witness to crimes against humanity may become a patsy and report on the atrocities done to a community but not on that community’s crimes of retaliation. Nonetheless, as the opening story illustrates, Ukrainians remember that Muggeridge, not Duranty, bore witness to their experience under Stalin’s government.
In order to focus on bearing witness as a moral claim, I will provide a comparative inquiry into a theological and a journalistic concept of bearing witness. In both areas, to bear witness is understood as an ethical act. It is a mode of making truth claims where the claim to veracity, or truthfulness, is contingent on bodily presence. Nevertheless, as I will show, witness is a fragile mode of communication; a person’s life may be at mortal risk, and others may not always interpret risk taking as truth telling. In order to investigate these two practices of bearing witness, I will look at prime examples of how veracity is contingent on bodily presence in each practice: the Christian martyr and the frontline correspondent.
The Christian experience of martyrdom overlaps with other religious and spiritual traditions, but here I focus on the practical moral reasoning associated with martyrdom in the Christian tradition. Bearing witness in the Christian tradition is inextricably linked with the body. The Greek New Testament word for witness is martys, and the English word martyr is a transliteration.7 Witness is a prominent theme in the New Testament; the Greek word “ µαρτυρία [marturia] and its fourteen cognates appear over 200 times,” and are most frequently found in the Johannine texts.8 One of those cognates is the word for testimony. The concept of bearing witness in Christian theology includes providing an eyewitness account of the life of Christ and proclaiming the kerygma, the proclamation of salvation through the crucified and risen Christ, as well as the meaning of martyrdom.9
In the Christian tradition, the original witnesses were those who observed the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ first hand. The status of eyewitness was not limited to the apostles, but being eyewitnesses gave the apostles particular credibility. New Testament scholar Alison A. Trites describes that credibility in this way: “To borrow words from the opening of I John, they can speak of ‘that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands’ (1 John 1:1), and therefore their testimony is of the greatest importance.”10 The apostles and other eyewitnesses, such as the women whose credibility was contested based on gender,11 engaged all their senses in their interactions with Christ.
In the Book of Acts, the apostles self-identify as witnesses: “ ‘We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard’ (4:20) and ‘we are witnesses to these things’ (5:32).”12 New Testament scholar Peter G. Bolt summarizes “these things” as “Jesus’ death, his resurrection, and the proclamation of forgiveness.”13 Bolt looks at the use of the word witness in Acts and finds, “µάρτυζ mostly refers to the twelve (Luke 24:48; Acts 1:8; 1:22; 2:32; 3:15; 5:32; 10:39, 41).”14 In the first chapter, the apostles replace Judas and choose a new disciple based on the criterion that this person has been an eyewitness of Christ within his final years. The apostle Peter speaks to Christ’s followers after Christ’s ascension: “Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”15 Eyewitness testimony, as well as being chosen by Jesus, remained a necessary requirement for the position of apostle. Matthias, the apostle chosen to replace Judas, was an eyewitness during Christ’s life, and Jesus chose him through the drawn lot (Acts 1:26). The process emphasized those who participated in the life of Christ as credible witnesses. However, Pilate was an eyewitness to the life and death of Christ, but he is not seen as witnessing, giving testimony, to Jesus Christ because he was not proclaiming the kerygma.
Witnesses’ credibility is an important concept with regard to truth telling. The testimony of witnesses is needed when there are conflicting accounts of an event. Both the field of theology and the field of law have a stake in the practice of witness retaining the meaning of reliable and trustworthy because both disciplines are concerned with justice. Both law and theology acknowledge that memory is not always exact, but the witness is not always “unreliable” as a result. Witnesses in a court of law may not remember exactly what happened to them. According to Hastings, Mason, and Pyper, “the ‘whole truth’ they [witnesses] tell may not be demonstrable but we [the legal system] acquit or condemn on its basis without any sense of violating truth. That does not imply that they may not have been honestly mistaken or dishonestly lying. It does imply we accept their testimony in good faith, because overall we judge them and their memories to be at least good guides to the truth. We respect their characters, and therefore their account of ‘what happened,’ even when their memories are not wholly mutually consistent. So it is in religion.”16
The words witness and testimony are near homonyms in the juridical sense, but Paul Ricoeur, in an article on the hermeneutics of testimony, argues that the juridical sense alone is insufficient when speaking of the religious use of the words. That use moves away from witness and testimony as providing proof and toward the act of witnessing and giving testimony. This is a move from a focus on obligation to one on lived practices. Within the Christian religion, a witness’s testimony is not a simple narration of things, but instead, “the witness seals his bond to the cause that he defends by a public profession of his conviction, by the zeal of a propagator, by a personal devotion which can extend even to the sacrifice of his life.”17
Not all eyewitnesses of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection responded with repentance and faith. As I mentioned above, Pilate was an eyewitness but not a convert and, like Pilate, many observe the Christian narrative but do not become engaged with it. Theologian James W. McClendon writes that those who hear the Christian stories “may be only spectators . . . In these terms, hearers of Christian stories have been witnessed to, and their following the witness may affect their lives in some degree. Yet what of the hearer who is not a hearer only, but who joins the action of the story, becomes ‘a doer of the word’ (James 1:22–5)? For these, following has become not mere attentive perception, but life itself; now following is called discipleship.”18 McClendon’s words are similar to Ricoeur’s quoted above. She who joins the action of the story becomes a character herself, and therefore has the credibility of an apostle.
The meaning of the word µαρτυρἱα, as in giving witness, shifted from providing eyewitness testimony of the resurrected Christ to being willing to suffer to the point of death by the hand of the state or other power for conviction of faith. Martyrs included both those who suffered and lived and those who suffered and died because of their confession. By the fourth century, those who suffered but had not died were called “confessors,” and those who died for their confession were crowned with the title of martyr.19 The meaning of µαρτυρἱα became synonymous with death, although this narrowing of the definition was not the desire of all Christian communities. Third-century theologian Origen wrote, “everyone who bears witness” to Christ “may properly be called a witness [Gr. martur].” He wanted to correct the church practice of reserving the name “martur” only “for those who have borne witness to the mystery of godliness by shedding their blood for it.”20 Origen did not win out; the phrase “bearing witness” remains inextricably linked to martyrdom.
In my introduction, I stated that bearing witness is a fragile mode of communication. The link to martyrdom, embodied witness to the point of death, is a straightforward example of such fragility. The fragility goes further. A Christian disciple’s death is not automatically interpreted as a case of testimony to the crucified and risen Christ. Sociologist Émile Durkheim classifies martyrdom as a type of suicide and characterizes it as an “over integration into one’s society.”21 Writing about early Christian martyrdom, Durkheim says: “All these neophytes who without killing themselves, voluntarily allowed their own slaughter, are really suicides . . . [T]hey had completely discarded their personalities for the idea of which they had become the servants.”22 Interestingly, in Durkheim’s description of martyrdom, the notion that the person died in service to an idea retains the communicative agency, or proclaiming testimony, involved in bearing witness. The death may not be interpreted as martyrdom, yet it is recognized as service to a belief.
Durkheim addresses early Christian martyrdom. What would he make of Christian martyrdom in more recent history? Would he classify the deaths of Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King Jr as suicides provoked by over integration into the ideas of their societies? These men knew that witnessing to their beliefs could likely lead to their deaths. The concept of martyrdom in the modern church focuses not only on confessing Christ under the threat of death but also on denouncing coercive practices: “Many modern martyrs . . . are not killed for admitting to the name of Christian, but for preaching the faith in a way that threatens vested interests.”23 The deaths of Romero, Bonhoeffer, and King may not be interpreted as Christian martyrdom outside of the church, but many recognize the social function of their struggle against hegemonic powers. Their lived experiences bear witness to the truth claim that being present does threaten “vested interests,” regardless of whether they are named Christian martyrs. Thus, while bearing witness through martyrdom is a fragile mode of communication, it still has communicative agency.
The practice of bearing witness may play a stronger socializing role for the community than does converting the skeptical. Anthony Harvey, Richard Finn, and Michael Smart argue that first- and second-century stories and texts, such as The Martyrdom of Polycarp, provided a socializing role for the early church. The stories of martyrdom structured “the moral imagination of early Christians, shaping and interpreting the ecclesial experience of persecution so that it became bearable for the community.”24 They claim that martyrdom was creatively interpreted to help transmit the faith to new generations and formulate a past, “as marked by heroic success rather than the often tawdry reality in which a great many Christians kept their heads down, sacrificed or bought fake certificates of sacrifice.”25 The stories of martyrdom allowed the Christian community to create stories of valour to sustain its social experience.
Martyrdom still plays a socializing role in Christian communities. Venerating martyrs is a way to express solidarity with the living and the dead of the Christian community. Veneration helps transmit the story and forms the moral imagination. Theologian James Tunstead Burtchaell argues that the veneration of martyrs within the Roman Catholic tradition is essentially popular.26 Catholicism is a bottom-up theology. Burtchaell claims the veneration of local martyrs socializes differing Christian communities in the universal way of Christianity. Nominations to canonize martyrs most often come from the witness’s former community. Burtchaell argues that the wisdom that guides moral reasoning is the experience of the community rather than a fixed moral law. The story of martyrs provides succour to those who are to endure in times of trial. Martyrdom primarily helps to shape the community and cultivate the space it takes up in the world. Martyrdom plays a significant role in the enculturation of Christian communities and in Christian communities today.
I have now discussed the efficacy or agency, albeit fragile, that bearing witness has for the community. In order to consider the efficacy of bearing witness as a mode of communication beyond the Christian community, I will consider how Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder employs the concept of witness for Christian social ethics. He claims that the Church’s witness is its ethic. For Yoder, the primary meaning of witness is “the functional necessity of just being there with a particular identity.”27 To “fraternize trans-ethnically,” “share bread,” and “forgive one another” are all visible activities that bear witness to the Church’s identity. In the field of Christian ethics, Yoder argues that witness, as the embodiment of conviction and belief, is a way to make truth claims that emphasizes truthfulness rather than securing claims to the truth. For Yoder, the efficacy of bearing witness is not measured by results but by faithfulness.
The social practice of bearing witness is a rich concept in the Christian tradition. From this brief investigation into the practical moral reasoning of bearing witness, I will highlight two important characteristics of the practice. First, bearing witness as a way to authenticate truth claims in Christian practice is a fragile mode of communication because of the mortal risk involved in being present in order to make truth claims. Second, it is a fragile mode of communication because the reliability of a witness is always open to suspicion – the veracity gap. The persistent hermeneutical issue can be summed up with the well-worn aphorism: “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.”
Can the issues that surround the concept of bearing witness and the question of efficacy clarify the claim of journalism as bearing witness? In the next section, I investigate the practical moral reasoning of bearing witness found in frontline journalism.
In Western journalism the foreign correspondent was traditionally a journalist native to the news organization’s country but living long term in another while acquiring fluency of language, developing knowledge about a country’s history, functioning confidently in its culture, and building a network of contacts, often on foundations laid by the previous correspondent.28 Such practices provide a good example of what was involved in becoming a long-term journalistic witness. Changes in modern journalism, however, have altered the kind of witness that journalists working abroad provide. With both technological changes and less attention on foreign news coverage, the practice of a correspondent spending years in a foreign country is becoming less common. News organizations now commonly parachute foreign correspondents from journalistic hubs, such as London, New York, or Tokyo, to foreign locations to cover major news stories.29 In the age of steamboats and trains this practice was not possible, as it took days or months to reach most conflicts. In the age of jets and digital communication this practice is commonplace, and most wars are accessible within a day’s travel. The 1990s conflict in the Balkans, for example, was within a couple of hours by plane for most major European news agencies. Given the ease and speed of international travel, expert foreign correspondents have commonly been replaced by frontline reporters used to bearing witness in many different settings. Though it is not the case for all journalism, increasingly frontline journalism is associated with bearing witness.
Why do frontline journalists spend their lives in this peripatetic fashion? In extensive interviews, Howard Tumber and Frank Webster found that frontline journalists who report on conflict were drawn not only by the excitement of such assignments but also by the desire to “seek out the truth” and have a “front-row seat” to history.30 Many of these correspondents perceive their journalistic duty of “truth seeking” as a moral or ethical “vocation.”31 Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer believe that the journalistic practice of truth telling rests on the authority of “presence, on the moral duty to bear witness by being there.”32 They suggest in-person presence matters, even if it means regular travel around the globe. Frontline journalism provides “visual authentication as well as personal testimonies, and thereby positions itself (and us the viewer) as ‘bearing witness.’ ”33 Witness involves the physical significance of being there – in the case of viewers, the journalist being there in the name of the public.
Journalistic witness bearing requires presence. In order to investigate how the presence of a war reporter creates credibility, I will consider the experience of the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson in covering the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war. Simpson had also covered the Gulf Wars, and in a memoir titled The Wars against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad, was critical of his own reportage. In a report Simpson filed from Baghdad at the end of the first Gulf War, he says, “As for the human casualties, tens of thousands of them, or the brutal effect the war had on millions of others . . . we didn’t see so much of that.”34 He wanted the 2003 coverage to be different.
In the 1990s, Simpson was frustrated by the US military’s press management. In the 1991 Gulf War, the US military operated by the press pool system, in which only reporters managed by press liaison officers were officially allowed into Iraq. Those who operated as unilateral reporters did not have privileged access to military press briefings or protection. In 2003, for Simpson, embedded journalism seemed to operate along the same lines as press pools.35 He chose to cover the start of the second Gulf War as a unilateral; he did not accept the free US military flight directly into Baghdad or a ride embedded with coalition ground troops. Simpson describes the price of embedded reporting in Iraq: “It became quite difficult for all but the hardest-nosed reporters to be absolutely honest about the soldiers who fed them, transported them, gave them the power they needed for their equipment, and (when necessary) saved their lives from the enemy. That mere word, ‘enemy’, shows how a mind-set was created . . . If you are with one side in a war, your fortunes and those of the soldiers you are with are pretty tightly intertwined; deep down, you are praying that they won’t fail.”36 Large media organizations, such as the BBC, were able to send teams of correspondents and their crews as both embedded and independent journalists. Simpson and his BBC crew chose to be unilateral: “We didn’t want to be beholden to the very people whose actions we were obliged to report on impartially. Nor did we think that it was right that the only reporting on this war should come from the embedded correspondents or else from those based in Baghdad.”37 Thus, he declined an embedded slot with coalition forces attacking Baghdad from the south, and instead travelled independently through Kurdish northern Iraq to arrive in Baghdad.
Simpson surmised that the credibility of his presence required journalistic autonomy. To bear witness to the Iraqi people’s experiences, he needed to be independent of coalition military forces. To speak truthfully, he needed to be on the scene facing similar risk as the Iraqi people. In a caravan to Baghdad, Simpson and his crew found themselves under accidental friendly fire and were hit by shrapnel from American missiles. One of Simpson’s local fixers was killed and Simpson was injured: “Fourteen pieces of shrapnel hit me altogether, and I was knocked to the ground. Most were pretty small, like the ones that hit me in the face and head, but two the size of bullets were big enough to have killed me. One lodged in my left hip, the other stuck in the plastic plate of my flak jacket right over the spine.”38 With his head, legs, and arms bleeding and his left eardrum “completely blown away,” Simpson gathered himself and his colleagues and started a live broadcast. It is easy to imagine how the broadcast looked and sounded. When it comes to “live-on-the-scene” reportage, television viewers’ aesthetic demands decrease. We have come to expect a kind of cinema verité; we find poor lighting, poor camera work, and poor audio acceptable in exchange for the credibility of someone who is live on the scene. The real-time live exposure portrays the “war reporter as a human figure who is as concerned about being live as about staying alive.”39 This is the excitement of live reporting, and it gives authority to the frontline reporter as bearing witness to actual war. As a result, audiences may assign Simpson credibility for his report, and trust BBC coverage generally and Simpson in particular. After all, he would never put himself and his crew at such risk if the story were not absolutely important and true. Back in the UK, doctors told Simpson they would not remove the shrapnel in his hip; his body would heal around the shrapnel, which is now a permanent memorial in his body he calls “George W. Bush.” Bearing witness is intricately connected to the body.
In both Christian practice and frontline journalism, bearing witness is a fragile mode of communication and therefore a fragile method for making truth claims. First, there is mortal risk associated with being present in order to witness war. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a non-profit organization, in 2007 Iraq was the deadliest location in the world for journalists since the US-led invasion in 2003.40 Journalists who bear witness to war, as Simpson asserts, fulfill an important function in a liberal democratic society.41 In order to provide a critical account of a war fought in the name of the public, journalists put themselves at grave risk to be on the scene. They are there because others cannot be. They are also there for those who would not otherwise be represented, as Simpson said he was there to portray ordinary Iraqis. Frontline journalists put themselves at grave risk so others can have their stories told. Both a Christian martyr and a frontline correspondent who dies in the line of duty are often remembered as serving a cause. Human rights or Christian communities often interpret their deaths as the result of threatening vested interests. As Christian communities venerate martyrs, human rights communities retell the stories of journalists who died when they tried to reveal injustices. Human rights communities consider how open or free a country is based in part on how safe it is for independent local journalists or foreign press.
Second, journalistic bearing witness is a fragile mode of communication because, like its Christian counterpart, it faces a veracity gap. To what extent did the journalist report truthfully? The hermeneutics of suspicion is alive and well when it comes to the critique of news media organizations. Simpson’s reportage can be accused of being part of the Western military-industrial complex that worked to legitimize the 2003 Iraq war. Reports from the field might be thought of as propaganda, or a limited view of a more complex issue, or too one sided, or guilty of myriad other charges against an objective press. Simpson commended the news organization Al Jazeera for its critique of British and American reporting: “Al-Jazeera, which is a remarkably free organization, broadcasting throughout the Middle East to people who will otherwise only get their own government’s view, acted as a reality-check on the British and American version of events. Its motto . . . is ‘Where there is one opinion, there is another one.’ ”42
Suspicious news audiences could potentially deny that Simpson was really even in Iraq. They could allege that the shrapnel in his leg is the result from some other accident. With regard to Simpson’s claim to be speaking for ordinary Iraqi people, he could be in danger of being a puppet for a particular Iraqi faction. A neo-colonial critique might raise the concerns over the BBC reporter creating an atavistic and distant “other” out of the Iraqi people. These risks and sources of challenge show that bearing witness as a way to make truth claims is fragile.
Is journalistic bearing witness to wars and other crisis events effective? Asked another way, did John Simpson’s presence effect any change? He did not stop or limit the war by reporting on the lives of Iraqi civilians. He did document a slice of history. Worth returning to are journalism scholars Allan and Zelizer, who write: “Being there suggests that the violence, devastation, suffering, and death that inevitably constitute war’s underside will somehow be rendered different – more amenable to response and perhaps less likely to recur – just because journalists are somewhere nearby.”43 This statement is a highly qualified, “best-case-scenario” argument for the efficacy of frontline journalism. Journalists’ presence does not stop wars.
After many successful years as a war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, who had been among the first journalists in Dachau after Germany unconditionally surrendered in May 1945, changed her mind about the efficacy of frontline journalism. At the start of her career, Gellhorn valued journalism as a means to public action and reform, but she later valued it as an end unto itself. She writes of the evolution of her motivation for reporting on conflicts, violence, and suffering over a sixty-year span:
When I was young I believed in the perfectibility of man, and in progress, and thought of journalism as a guiding light. If people were told the truth, if dishonour and injustice were clearly shown to them, they would at once demand the saving action, punishment of wrong-doers, and care for the innocent. How people were to accomplish these reforms, I did not know. That was their job. A journalist’s job was to bring news, to be eyes for their conscience. I think I must have imagined public opinion as a solid force, something like a tornado, always ready to blow on the side of the angels . . . Now I have different ideas. I must always, before, have expected results. There was an obtainable end, called victory or defeat. One could hope for victory, despair over defeat. At this stage in my life I think that this is nonsense . . . Journalism is a means; and I now think that the act of keeping the record straight is valuable in itself. Serious, careful, honest journalism is essential, not because it is a guiding light but because it is a form of honourable behaviour, involving the reporter and the reader.44
Keeping the record straight is important for the journalist’s relationship with the public, but it is also important for the journalist’s role of portraying the victims of violence and suffering. In the end, an accurate record better serves public deliberation and those whose story the journalist retells. Perhaps the efficacy of frontline correspondence is first to build the audience’s trust.
In Christian martyrdom, there are various ways to measure efficacy, such as through the role bearing witness serves in communities. Martyrdom may do more for the community than for the political situation, but the life story of a martyr can sustain the community and form a platform for future action. Simpson and other frontline correspondents’ reportage may help sustain the human rights community or peace activists, or communities who support free press and media systems. However, such aid also demonstrates the fragility of bearing witness, as it raises journalistic institutional concerns about journalism of attachment (which is more derisively called do something journalism). Some critics describe journalism of attachment as “advocacy journalism,” which suggests it is flawed in several ways. First, attachment to one group of civilians may be at the expense of others. This can result in journalists overlooking atrocities committed by groups to which they are “attached.” Second, advocacy journalism is not as independent from government as it claims. Philip Hammond believes that journalism of attachment is just as susceptible to becoming a tool of propaganda during war as impartial and detached journalism: “Instead of truthful reporting, the agenda of advocacy journalism has sometimes made reporters highly selective, leading them to ignore inconvenient information . . . And despite claims to be pursuing a moral, human rights agenda, the journalism of attachment has led to the celebration of violence against those perceived as undeserving victims.”45 As examples, Hammond cites the bombing of Serbian civilians during the Bosnian War and the sending of Hutus from refugee camps back into Rwanda to likely become victims of revenge attacks by Tutsis during the Rwandan Genocide. Journalism of attachment is susceptible to such faults in part because of what Hammond calls a simplistic frame of “good versus evil morality.”46 As for his second criticism, questioning the actual independence of advocacy journalism, he found that such journalism frequently coincides with the perspectives and policies of powerful Western governments.
Bearing witness is an embodied way to make truth claims. Mortal risk is inextricable from the concept of bearing witness; the body in peril carries weight. While the hermeneutics of suspicion remain, a person who makes a truth claim and risks death or is dead is less likely to be suspected of grasping for power than someone who makes a truth claim from a place of relative safety. A comparative approach to the concept of bearing witness in the practice of the Christian tradition and in frontline journalism brings to light how to understand the efficacy of bearing witness as a way of making truth claims. Bearing witness helps enculturate communities around particular convictions, and helps strengthen particular communities. Persuasive power is found through being present, even in the face of danger.
1 Hennadiy Yefimenko, “Demographic Consequence of Holodomor of 1933 in Ukraine,” ed. Institute of History Kiev (The All-Union Census of 1937 in Ukraine, 2003). Holodomor is Ukrainian for “hunger plague.”
2 Malcolm Muggeridge, Winter in Moscow (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1934), 244–5.
3 Duranty used the omelette line in reference to Stalin’s five year plan. S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’ Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 222.
4 In Christ and the Media, Muggeridge contends that the television camera is a lying witness: “Not only can the camera lie, it always lies.” Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 30.
5 I borrow the concept of witnesses caught up in “webs of complicity” from John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2005), 256.
6 John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture and Society 23 (6, 2001): 714.
7 Walter A. Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1984).
8 Allison A. Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 66.
9 Joseph A. Komonchak, Mary Collins, and Dermot A. Lane, eds., The New Dictionary of Theology (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987).
10 Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness, 114–15.
11 The Synoptic gospels and John all agree that Mary Magdalene was the first eyewitness, but do reluctantly, according to New Testament scholar Claudia Setzer. She argues that the gospel writers could not violate the fixed tradition that Mary was the first witness, so the gospel writers narrated the story in a way that diminishes the significance of her being the first eyewitness. Claudia Setzer, “Excellent Women: Female Witness to the Resurrection,” Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (2, 1997): 259–72.
12 Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness, 138.
13 Peter G. Bolt, “Mission and Witness,” in Witness to the Gospel: The Theology of Acts, ed. I. Howard Marshall and David Peterson (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 199.
14 Ibid., 192.
15 Holy Bible, New International Version, trans. International Bible Society (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishing, 1973), Acts 1:21–2.
16 Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason, and Hugh Pyper, eds., The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 421.
17 Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis S. Mudge (London: SPCK, 1981), 129.
18 James W. McClendon, Witness: Systematic Theology, Volume 3 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2000), 356.
19 Joseph F. Kelly, ed., The Concise Dictionary of Early Christianity (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 106.
20 Origen, quoted in David W. Bercot, ed., A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs: A Reference Guide to more than 700 Topics Discussed by the Early Church Fathers (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1998), 430.
21 Le Suicide: Étude Sociologique was published in English in 1951. References are from the following English translation: Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, ed. George Simpson, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951).
22 Ibid., 227.
23 Hastings, Mason, and Pyper, eds., The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, 412.
24 Anthony Harvey, Richard Finn, and Michael Smart, “Christian Martyrdom: History and Interpretation,” in Witnesses to Faith? Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam, ed. Brian Wicker (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 41.
25 Ibid.
26 James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Giving and Taking of Life: Essays Ethical (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
27 John Howard Yoder, For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997), 42.
28 Ulf Hannerz, Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
29 For a discussion on “parachute reporting,” see Hannerz, Foreign News, 23–6, and see also Philip Seib, Beyond the Front Lines: How the News Media Cover a World Shaped by War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Mark Pedelty, War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents (New York: Routledge, 1995); John Maxwell Hamilton and Eric Jenner, “Redefining Foreign Correspondence,” Journalism 5 (3, 2004): 301–21.
30 Howard Tumber and Frank Webster, Journalists under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practice (London: SAGE, 2006).
31 Howard Tumber, “The Fear of Living Dangerously: Journalists Who Report on Conflict,” International Relations 20 (2006): 445.
32 Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer, eds., Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime (New York: Routledge, 2004), 5.
33 Simon Cottle and Mugdha Rai, “Between Display and Deliberation: Analyzing TV News as Communicative Architecture,” Media, Culture and Society 28 (2, 2006): 179.
34 John Simpson, The Wars against Saddam: Taking the Hard Road to Baghdad (London: Macmillan, 2003), 287.
35 For further examples of embedded journalism in Iraq see Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, eds., Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq – An Oral History (Guildford, CT: Lyons Press, 2003).
36 Simpson, The Wars against Saddam, 350.
37 Ibid., 351.
38 Ibid., 330–1.
39 Johannes Maier, “Being Embedded – The Concept of ‘Liveness’ in Journalism,” Journal of Visual Culture 5 (2006): 98.
40 The Committee to Protect Journalists is a New York-based non-profit and non-governmental organization founded to promote the protection of journalists and independent journalism. It published the report Journalists Killed in 2007 on its website, www.cpj.org.
41 Simpson, The Wars against Saddam, 352.
42 Ibid., 344–5.
43 Allan and Zelizer, eds., Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime, 5.
44 Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War, rev. ed. (London: Granata, 1993), 373.
45 Philip Hammond, “Moral Combat: Advocacy Journalists and the New Humanitarianism,” in Rethinking Human Rights: Critical Approaches to International Politics, ed. David Chandler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 180.
46 Ibid., 178.