One of the outstanding TV journalists of our time provides a compelling account that mixes autobiography, reportage and a ‘state of the nation’ survey of wartime reporting
A smoke bomb went off. Then shots were fired from buildings overlooking the square… The camera had a BBC News sign on it. Someone cried out from the crowd: ‘You are the world, you are the world, you have to tell what they are doing to our people.’
From Vietnam to Iraq, Martin Bell has seen how war has changed over the last fifty years, neither fought nor reported the way it used to be. Truth is degraded in the name of balance and good taste, reports are delivered from the sidelines, and social media, with rumours and unverifiable videos, has ushered in a post-truth world.
As modern news increasingly seeks to entertain first and inform second, the man in the white suit provides a moving account of all he has witnessed throughout his career and issues an impassioned call to put the substance back into reporting.
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‘Thought-provoking and hard-hitting.’
" -
Mail on Sunday"
‘Throughout the book…[Bell] reflects on the television reporter’s trade, to which he brought so much distinction. He sees it as doomed, a result of “hotel rooftop” reporting from war zones by correspondents harried by hourly demands for new content, the “celebrification” of so much news and the shrinking of foreign coverage in both broadcasting and newspapers.’
" - John Lloyd,
Literary Review