They want to shut you up. We. Must. Not. Shut. Up
Sorry gang. This blog is about Dad, but I feel I know him well enough to know that he'd be happy to write a bit about his second-born, my sister, Kate Peyton (deceased) in the light of the Maryland shootings. It's mainly because I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore.
Kate, a Senior Producer, Newsgathering, for the BBC, was gunned down in the street in Mogadishu on 9 February 2005. She died later that day of blood loss, after valiant attempts of Somali and international medical staff to save her life. Like so many great, generous and difficult tasks we take on, they failed, but I salute them and thank them in their failure, as I do the staff who tried to save my father 40 years ago at the West Suffolk, Bury St Edmunds and in Cambridge at Addenbrookes and then Papworth. Dad could just not settle in his dying days, while Kate was always a fan of staying put if she could possibly arrange it: as in life so in death.
We really do have to try in this life. We have a duty to one another to try to help where we can. We have to struggle to save people's lives, and this is part of what medics do. And so do journalists, from local journalists to international CelebJournos, their pairing away of lies and obfuscation can save us all. Today, I am thinking of all the journalists and media workers who have been killed in their line of work, and because of the murder of journalists at the Capital Gazette yesterday, I am thinking of the protection of civil society from those who would destroy it. I am thinking of the losses suffered globally, mostly in murders, incidents and accidents we mostly do not have reported in the West, because most media workers are killed in their home country and are not of interest to us, the readers, because they are too far away and, seemingly, too different to bother about.
But this has happened right at the heart of Western democracy which has considered itself somehow to be a bastion of journalistic excellence, and because it has happened in the US, the heart of the fashionable dismantling of the credibility and humanity of those we disagree with, especially journalists; the hotbed of government-generated fake news. I am angry and I am afraid. Because it is right on my doorstep, and not like Charlie Hebdo where religion-inspired fascists attacked our basic human rights, but because this atmosphere has been created by those in power in the very country where these journalists worked, I wanted to tell a bit of a story to tell you how much I care about journalism, journalists and, by extension, democracy itself. This kind of thing happens in places like Russia and Turkey and we already know that. I am afraid because a Western government is turning on us all. But so much more than afraid, I am angry.
My beloved sister Kate was a Senior Producer for the BBC and had just arrived in the country. My family and I are on the record about the despicable treatment we received at the hands of the BBC once we were through the immediate aftermath, where their procedures and shock meant they supported us very well indeed.
Then things changed. They tried, first of all, to throw one of their own under the bus, to let them take full blame for my sister being in the most dangerous city of, arguably, the most dangerous country in the world when she did not want to be there.
When it became clear we saw their failings as systemic rather than any one individual's fault, when they knew we were coming for them: me, the show-off, my bespectacled brother and our five-foot high widowed mother, when they realised the cold, hard truth that The Peytons, Actress, Copy Editor, Shop Assistant, were after them, they came out all guns blazing. Or they fell into inexcusable silence. When they knew their reputation might be damaged by people who were after The Truth, they went into what I call Corporate Clinch and bore down on us with an intoxicating combination of silence, lies and threats. This pressure compressed my emotions and my very self and has left me, still, all these years on, confused, jumpy and pretty much broken. The attitude and behaviour of the BBC exacerbated my state enormously. It was nearly four years of a special kind of hell. And the management of the BBC chose to do it to me personally, and my dear brother, and our remarkable mother (see my previous posts about her and her brilliance).
And yet.
I will defend the BBC and other news organisations, in spite of it all, in spite of the fact that this is how they usually react when they are implicated in the death of one of their employees. They fear for their reputation, they fear for their bottom line and they fear The Truth. That news organisations and the people who work for them are not perfect should not come as any surprise: none of us is. That the BBC refused to accept the advice of the Coroner until he felt compelled to write them a letter to which they had to reply, that they have never taken up my offer (as a professional communication skills trainer and experienced griever) of help with their parlous behaviour towards the grieving family of their bullied and then murdered employee is beyond disappointing, but entirely coherent with the idea that only they know what's right. (Indeed, a couple of journalists, during this time, told me I should not be investigating the lead up to my sister's murder because I was not a journalist. I never managed to explain to them that a journalist is anyone who investigates and reports on facts and uses clear analysis, a journalist asks questions and speaks truth to power. I didn't tell them because all I had the energy for was the fight, getting dressed in the morning and opening the gin in the evening).
We'll never know who killed Kate or why he did it. That seems terribly shocking to most people I meet, but as a family we accepted that fact very early on, almost instantaneously; there was not a developed culture of investigation of such things in Somalia, and I have some funny stories about how that unfolded for us as a family, but I'll tell those another time. Suffice to say they do involve us comforting our Detective Inspector as he tried to explain to us we'd never have 'justice'. I think he was afraid we'd be angry, but we just chuckled, our mother with the throatiest laugh. Just like any family in-joke, really.
There is a lot of agreement, though, that the murder of a white, western, female, journalist was designed to send a message to those who would interfere in, including the reporting on, matters of the Somali state. And it had the desired effect: the return of the government in exile, which not all Somalis agreed with by any means, which Kate was partially there to report on, was halted, and Western interests pulled back a bit, shocked, appalled and afraid for the skins of others who might go and report on, support or interrogate the goings-on in Somalia.
To be clear: the murder of my sister was almost certainly included an attack on Western journalism, and this attack was the cousin of the President of the United States calling the press the "most dishonest people" repeatedly, for example, and those other ghastly things I can hardly bear to read.
This is complicated stuff. It's nuanced, people will disagree on any given idea the human mind can invent, and, as I've said in my show Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister 111 times to date, journalists will always have to work in dangerous places. But that the dangerous place is their own office and the attacker is another national of their country almost certainly tells us that the vicious attacks by the current US administration on not only the credibility but the very humanity of journalists is changing us. The diatribes of vitriol, the kind of verbal attacks and threats which someone like Carole Cadwalladr has received beggars belief. As the inestimable Marie Colvin's family fight to prove that she was targeted and murdered by the Syrian Arab Republic, are we approaching a time where the Western powerplayers' yells of "Traitor!" when there is disagreement will turn us into states which literally kill the opposition and any journalist giving it space to be heard?
In my opinion, these are a clear warning signs. My sister asked her colleague, as the driver rushed her to a central Mogadishu hospital, "Am I going to die?" and, as a journalist, he could only respond by saying that everyone would do their best to save her: there could be no assurances. But if we do not defend civil society in general, and journalism with all its failings, in particular, democracy will wither and die. The time to resist is now, and I'm not sure what to do, but I'm going to do my best to act. No journalist or media worker should die in vain while they are trying to save our lives.
Kate, a Senior Producer, Newsgathering, for the BBC, was gunned down in the street in Mogadishu on 9 February 2005. She died later that day of blood loss, after valiant attempts of Somali and international medical staff to save her life. Like so many great, generous and difficult tasks we take on, they failed, but I salute them and thank them in their failure, as I do the staff who tried to save my father 40 years ago at the West Suffolk, Bury St Edmunds and in Cambridge at Addenbrookes and then Papworth. Dad could just not settle in his dying days, while Kate was always a fan of staying put if she could possibly arrange it: as in life so in death.
We really do have to try in this life. We have a duty to one another to try to help where we can. We have to struggle to save people's lives, and this is part of what medics do. And so do journalists, from local journalists to international CelebJournos, their pairing away of lies and obfuscation can save us all. Today, I am thinking of all the journalists and media workers who have been killed in their line of work, and because of the murder of journalists at the Capital Gazette yesterday, I am thinking of the protection of civil society from those who would destroy it. I am thinking of the losses suffered globally, mostly in murders, incidents and accidents we mostly do not have reported in the West, because most media workers are killed in their home country and are not of interest to us, the readers, because they are too far away and, seemingly, too different to bother about.
But this has happened right at the heart of Western democracy which has considered itself somehow to be a bastion of journalistic excellence, and because it has happened in the US, the heart of the fashionable dismantling of the credibility and humanity of those we disagree with, especially journalists; the hotbed of government-generated fake news. I am angry and I am afraid. Because it is right on my doorstep, and not like Charlie Hebdo where religion-inspired fascists attacked our basic human rights, but because this atmosphere has been created by those in power in the very country where these journalists worked, I wanted to tell a bit of a story to tell you how much I care about journalism, journalists and, by extension, democracy itself. This kind of thing happens in places like Russia and Turkey and we already know that. I am afraid because a Western government is turning on us all. But so much more than afraid, I am angry.
My beloved sister Kate was a Senior Producer for the BBC and had just arrived in the country. My family and I are on the record about the despicable treatment we received at the hands of the BBC once we were through the immediate aftermath, where their procedures and shock meant they supported us very well indeed.
Then things changed. They tried, first of all, to throw one of their own under the bus, to let them take full blame for my sister being in the most dangerous city of, arguably, the most dangerous country in the world when she did not want to be there.
When it became clear we saw their failings as systemic rather than any one individual's fault, when they knew we were coming for them: me, the show-off, my bespectacled brother and our five-foot high widowed mother, when they realised the cold, hard truth that The Peytons, Actress, Copy Editor, Shop Assistant, were after them, they came out all guns blazing. Or they fell into inexcusable silence. When they knew their reputation might be damaged by people who were after The Truth, they went into what I call Corporate Clinch and bore down on us with an intoxicating combination of silence, lies and threats. This pressure compressed my emotions and my very self and has left me, still, all these years on, confused, jumpy and pretty much broken. The attitude and behaviour of the BBC exacerbated my state enormously. It was nearly four years of a special kind of hell. And the management of the BBC chose to do it to me personally, and my dear brother, and our remarkable mother (see my previous posts about her and her brilliance).
And yet.
I will defend the BBC and other news organisations, in spite of it all, in spite of the fact that this is how they usually react when they are implicated in the death of one of their employees. They fear for their reputation, they fear for their bottom line and they fear The Truth. That news organisations and the people who work for them are not perfect should not come as any surprise: none of us is. That the BBC refused to accept the advice of the Coroner until he felt compelled to write them a letter to which they had to reply, that they have never taken up my offer (as a professional communication skills trainer and experienced griever) of help with their parlous behaviour towards the grieving family of their bullied and then murdered employee is beyond disappointing, but entirely coherent with the idea that only they know what's right. (Indeed, a couple of journalists, during this time, told me I should not be investigating the lead up to my sister's murder because I was not a journalist. I never managed to explain to them that a journalist is anyone who investigates and reports on facts and uses clear analysis, a journalist asks questions and speaks truth to power. I didn't tell them because all I had the energy for was the fight, getting dressed in the morning and opening the gin in the evening).
We'll never know who killed Kate or why he did it. That seems terribly shocking to most people I meet, but as a family we accepted that fact very early on, almost instantaneously; there was not a developed culture of investigation of such things in Somalia, and I have some funny stories about how that unfolded for us as a family, but I'll tell those another time. Suffice to say they do involve us comforting our Detective Inspector as he tried to explain to us we'd never have 'justice'. I think he was afraid we'd be angry, but we just chuckled, our mother with the throatiest laugh. Just like any family in-joke, really.
There is a lot of agreement, though, that the murder of a white, western, female, journalist was designed to send a message to those who would interfere in, including the reporting on, matters of the Somali state. And it had the desired effect: the return of the government in exile, which not all Somalis agreed with by any means, which Kate was partially there to report on, was halted, and Western interests pulled back a bit, shocked, appalled and afraid for the skins of others who might go and report on, support or interrogate the goings-on in Somalia.
To be clear: the murder of my sister was almost certainly included an attack on Western journalism, and this attack was the cousin of the President of the United States calling the press the "most dishonest people" repeatedly, for example, and those other ghastly things I can hardly bear to read.
This is complicated stuff. It's nuanced, people will disagree on any given idea the human mind can invent, and, as I've said in my show Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister 111 times to date, journalists will always have to work in dangerous places. But that the dangerous place is their own office and the attacker is another national of their country almost certainly tells us that the vicious attacks by the current US administration on not only the credibility but the very humanity of journalists is changing us. The diatribes of vitriol, the kind of verbal attacks and threats which someone like Carole Cadwalladr has received beggars belief. As the inestimable Marie Colvin's family fight to prove that she was targeted and murdered by the Syrian Arab Republic, are we approaching a time where the Western powerplayers' yells of "Traitor!" when there is disagreement will turn us into states which literally kill the opposition and any journalist giving it space to be heard?
In my opinion, these are a clear warning signs. My sister asked her colleague, as the driver rushed her to a central Mogadishu hospital, "Am I going to die?" and, as a journalist, he could only respond by saying that everyone would do their best to save her: there could be no assurances. But if we do not defend civil society in general, and journalism with all its failings, in particular, democracy will wither and die. The time to resist is now, and I'm not sure what to do, but I'm going to do my best to act. No journalist or media worker should die in vain while they are trying to save our lives.
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