2. She is asking journalists, as well as talk show hosts, soap opera scriptwriters, and others to change their aims and adopt those of her organization.

3. I cannot speak for soap opera writers, but we get requests like this all the time in my business. Most ofen, it is from governments and political parties, not so often from an NGO. I listen to all, and try to hear them out, but on the whole I am deeply skeptical of people who say I should throw out everything I know about news-gathering and adopt their agenda.

4. I wish her organization well, for I know their published work is often of exceptional quality. But before I take on their agenda, I would want to examine it closely. I recall well before Macedonia exploded in violence a couple of yeasrs ago, Search for Common Ground was there, producing some very good material on the political situation in that country. It was a very small pond, and Search was up and running, and had time to press their model. The fact is, by my standards at least, it didn’t work. There was violence which was brought under control by training the international spotlight on the problems, and eventually by intervention. My feeling is that the Albanian minority had real and burning grievances against the entrenched majority, and these had to be spotlighted and surmounted before that society could begin to resolve them. That’s what I wrote about, the differences. If that’s irresponsible journalism, well,, I vigorously disagree. I will go beyond that. I think there is today no higher need in journalism than to cover conflict. We could cover conflicts better than we do, and I will return to that, but first and foremost, we should cover them. Small wars have proven in the past decade to be a mask for war crimes, for genocides, for terrorists, for drug dealing, for crime in general. And it is the job of journalism to be there, to cover the events, to remove that mask, and expose what is really going on.

5. Yigal Carmon complains that the media waits for events to happen and does not anticipate genocide by paying sufficient attention to the shift to dehumanizing language which, he rightly points out, precedes practically every genocide. But while I appreciate his identifying of that trend, I note two or possibly three papers on that topic in our briefing book. The trend has only recently been identified in this form, though journalists have known it for much longer. Let me point out the real problem with reporting it. Yes, if Radio Milles Collines started up again tomorrow, we would make a story out of it. But the real problem is not poisonous hate speech, rather it is the big lie contained often in print and then repeated on television. The facts are not facts at all, but propaganda, and it takes an enormous investigative effort to prove that it is a lie. You cannot do that on a tight deadline. You need a lot of time.

6. So, where does news reporting fit into the issues being addressed at this conference? I would say, from personal experience, that news is that which should not be happening; it is whatever the powers-that-be want to suppress. In a genocide, it is the crimes themselves. We should expose them, get all the facts, bring them before the public. Provide the new ICC prosecutor with leads, but do it in print or on the air. These crimes are an element in genocide.

7. I’ve said we can do better, and I base that on my own experience. An escalating series of war crimes in the war in Croatia preceded the genocide in Bosnia. The problem with saying we should report on crimes short of genocide is that we do not always recognize them, and in that case, in Croatia, we did not. But I posit that it often happens that war crimes lead to much bigger crimes. But to spot the trend, you have to understand the laws of armed conflict and how they apply.

8. And this brings me to a project I have been engaged in the past five years. A product is this book, which has more than 90 contributors. It is out in 10 languages, including our latest, Arabic. It contains definitions and how they apply. We should learn them. So should you. So should the general public. The laws of war are part of civilizations’ heritage. They belong to everyone. Their aim is protect non-combatants. But they will not be upheld if we do not know them.

9. The object of this book was to provide a pocket-sized vade mecum. It proved thicker than pocket size, and so is the topic. While many colleagues will say reporters don’t like to be trained, the fact is that the BBC itself is a pioneer in putting its reporters trhough training courses in reducing the risks of war coverage. I contend that valuable course needs to be supplemented. We journalists need education in the laws of armed conflict. That’s the aim of this book.

10. My more recent project was teaching a course to mid-career reporters and graduate journalism students on how to report conflicts. I invited in military experts and focused on strategy, tactics, operations, the laws of armed conflict, as well as force and foreign policy. It worked far far better than I expected. Everyone agreed that they acquired vital tools that would result in better coverage. Whether it does indeed remains to be seen. But this is an experiment I can advocate replicating. As for the suggestions in the option papers, I would say they need refinement. We should welcome your initiatives, but let us make sure they work, and that we aren’t already doing them.