Making the positive as gripping as the negative remains the challenge

My holding back came from the fact that I did not feel that I was in a position to give advice to journalists who were in the employment of others and depended entirely on them for their livelihood. I have fortunately always been free to write what I want or refuse to write what others want me to write – a freedom not enjoyed by all. I have been fortunate to be able to stick to my deepest convictions.

I have just been looking through my bulging file marked ICF, recalling the letters from Bill and the conferences in different parts of the world. I attended the launching of ICF in Switzerland and also events in the United States and Britain. I was even asked to “pinch hit” for Rajmohan Gandhi at one conference. I use “pinch hit” as I lived many years in the United States and coming home to live in England I have noticed that everyone seems to be “stepping up to the plate” without probably knowing that this expression, too, comes from baseball.

I notice that I ended one article I wrote about Bill fifteen years ago when I lived in the United States: “Certainly this Englishman’s integrity and purpose is an encouraging contrast to some of the images of the British press that reach these shores. Was it a certain professional jealousy, however, rather than a mature perspective that caused a writer, profiling Tine Brown, editor ofThe New Yorker in the New York Times Magazine, to attribute her success to ‘an importation of British standards, which is to say hardly any at all’”?

As a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists for more than 45 years, I have always appreciated Bill’s battle for standards, and for the personal responsibility of journalists. When I sat in for Gandhi I described how when I first went to Oregon more than thirty years ago I noted on the wall of the main paper the Oregonian a copy of the Oregon Code of Ethics of Journalism. After the building was remodelled it was taken down and never went up again. It said among other things: “It is not true that a newspaper should be as advanced in its ethical atmosphere as it conceives the average of its readers to be. No man who is not in ethical advance of the average of his community should be in the profession of journalism.”

I am doubtful that Bill would subscribe entirely to such a lofty requirement but he was passionately concerned about journalists holding themselves accountable for what was happening in society. I don’t quite know with modern hiring practices how you would ensure such high standards on our part.

I had also just been interviewed by what was then the world service of the Christian Science Monitor whose sentiments, I think, tie in well with Bill’s concerns and in this case is an aim that we could still aspire to. I asked my interviewer if I could see a copy of the guidelines that they supply to their reporters. This is a quotation from those guidelines: “A story dealing with a problem or a tragedy should at least report the basic changes of action or thought required to deal constructively with a current situation or to prevent a similar problem in the future. Thus, a reporter needs to be expectantly alert to finding sources who are bringing a constructive approach to any given problem.”

If this advice were followed more generally there would be fewer people like the lady I sat next to in a plane who, on discovering I was a journalist, said, “I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in months and I feel so much better. It’s like when I gave up smoking.”

Both Bill Porter and I were much inspired many years ago by the same British journalist and author, Peter Howard, a man whose professionalism and integrity was a challenge to us both. At a time when he was one of the highest paid political journalists in Britain, writing at the same time for the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the Evening Standard he chanced on a story that changed his life. Forbidden to write about politics because his boss Lord Beaverbrook had joined Britain’s wartime government, he looked around for juicy targets. At that time Moral Re-Armament (MRA), now known as Initiatives of Change, had lurid rumours circulating about it, some of them fostered by his Express colleague, Tom Driberg.

Howard investigated MRA thoroughly, found the allegations against it unfounded and did not write the story but, as he said, “became the story” and lost his job. The Daily Telegraph wrote later, “There seems to have been far more remarkable conversions since Paul of Tarsus set off for Damascus.” His dramatic change of lifestyle sent shock waves through Fleet Street. “Who will be next?” worried Percy Cudlipp, editor of the Daily Herald.

In the next twenty years his thirty books and plays helped give faith and purpose to millions. In a preface to one play he wrote that his purpose was “to encourage men to accept the growth in character that is essential if civilization is to survive. It is to help all who want peace in the world to be ready to pay the price of peace in their own personality”.

In his autobiography, Do Something About It, Bill Porter writes of Howard’s courageous efforts and his fight for moral values in the highest circles of British and international life. But admits he didn’t accept his personal challenge. Bill Porter wrote, “I still remember his saying, ‘You are meant to be a mighty tree, under whose branches many people can find shelter and purpose’ but I didn’t grasp his vision for me.” After Peter’s death Bill renewed contact with his widow, Doe, and could write, “She has helped me to feel that I have tried to pick up the baton which fell from Howard’s hands in his fight for a positive media.”

I worked closely with Peter Howard for more than ten years and I think he would have been delighted with the mighty tree that Bill became. As Bill hints, and I discovered working with Peter, life with him could be uncomfortable. He demanded of us some of the same disciplines Lord Beaverbrook demanded when training him. I learned from Howard lessons of all kind, whether it was the importance of meeting deadlines and being punctual, of checking facts, of using short sentences and few adjectives. “Some chapters of the Bible,” he would point out, “hardly have an adjective in them”. In one letter encouraging me to avoid clichés, and incidentally mentioning someone well known in public life today, he wrote: “If you look at the article by XXXX in last week’s Evening Standard (for which he was paid a chunk of bullion) you will see more clichés to the square millimetre than you have accomplished so far in a short lifetime. It is a fabulous demonstration of how not to write.” He also constantly asked whom I had written an article for, meaning not which media outlet but “which particular person are you speaking to?”

Other Howard sentences come to mind: “Go through, and strike out, with a blue pencil, all the passages that are simply an expression of your own emotion rather than an arrow aimed at a particular point in a particular heart. Acquire the discipline of simplicity. Don't try and decorate the body and excite the senses without having first built the framework, the skeleton. Like a Christmas tree, writing comes alive when less is hung upon it.”

In addition, Howard expected from me as from Bill spiritual disciplines of a challenging kind. Bill writes about this aspect in his autobiography where he reproduces an interview with his granddaughter, Natalie, and answers her question about what he means by inner compulsion: “It must be a major factor in having an effective purpose. Some think that it is the spirit of God working in a person’s heart and mind. I often describe myself as a lapsed agnostic, because this experience has given me a sense of faith, which had long ago deserted me. I believe it is possible for each one of us to find his or her sense of destiny. Conscience plays a big role. I had to look squarely at it, and put right, the moral compromises in my life. As you peel off the often deeply encrusted layers of wrong doing, you get a greater sense of reality and purpose and become a human being whose life matters. I strongly recommend this purpose to all.”.

With the democratisation of the media with blogs and podcasts and all sorts of online opportunities the younger person coming along now has far more opportunities than we ever had. The traditional entry points are no longer as important. But the old disciplines and professionalism still apply. Also the determination to persevere in the face of rejections of which I had many. Op-ed page editors are looking for pieces that highlight conflict while I was always looking for things that bring people together. One editor who liked my pieces, for that reason rationed me on how many he would print. Making what is positive as interesting, gripping and readable as the negative remains the challenge.

As the final statement of the Oregon Code of Ethics of Journalism challenges us: “We affirm the printed word, medium of global communications, is a means to the end of freeing the human mind from bigotry, hate and intolerance and for the establishment of better living, international peace and justice to all.”  

Michael Henderson is an English journalist and broadcaster and author of eleven books including No Enemy to Conquer – Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World, Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate, The Forgiveness Factor, See You After the Duration – the Story of British Evacuees to North America in World War II and Experiment with Untruth – India Under Emergency. He has been a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists since 1965 and has worked all over the world including 25 years in the United States. He has been associated for more than 60 years with Initiatives of Change