Truth-Telling Wins
By David Smith
November 2021
When it comes to winners of the Nobel Peace prize, I’ve been spoiled, having had the privilege of working with two Laureates, and so carrying the abiding memory of two truth-tellers who found a way to bring the best of humanity to confront the worst of it.
One was my boss at the United Nations, the late Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ever the diplomat but always ready to let friends and foes hear the truth on the big issues. Think everything from war and peace to hunger and disease, from climate change to poverty and gender equality. With a velvet glove, and a soft tone that masked fierce determination, Kofi Annan knew how to spell truth with a capital T. He was the main world leader, for example, to call out the George Dubya Bush administration on the war in Iraq.
The other was a doctor in the war zone of Eastern Congo, one Denis Mugweke, a hero I concluded on trips to see him at Panzi hospital in Bukavu, finding him sheltering, then treating women who had been systematically, brutally raped by soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war. Dr Denis ducked bullets aplenty from his enemies just to make it to work some days, but he carried his own armoury, so you learned.
“The truth is not the only weapon we have, it’s our best one,” he told me as he introduced me one afternoon to Sifa, a 10-year-old with a child’s eyes and a wonderful, innocent smile, gang-raped by seven armed militiamen in her home town, in front of others. “And the truth will win.”
That thought came flooding back with the surprise announcement from Oslo recently, and the Nobel committee, that this year’s Peace Prize goes to two crusading journalists, one in the Philippines, the other in Russia. A choice that broke new ground for the Nobel, and sent us all an important message in an age when truth lies in the eye of the beholder, or the politician, or the corporation, or the zealot. That truth-telling lies at the heart of humanity’s well-being.
I remembered one of our new Laureates, Maria Ressa in Manila, in the days when she worked for CNN and I would appear occasionally on their air. She was always a brave reporter, now she’s an even more courageous creator of an online network capable of staring down, then calling out, the murderous regime of Rodrigo Duterte, especially for a “war on drugs” that became a killing machine.
I knew nothing of the other prize-winner, Russia’s Dmitry Muratov, except my years in Moscow, in the late 1980s, taught me how the inventors of newspapers spoke truth to power in remarkable ways as the old Soviet Union collapsed. Vividly, I recalled a couple of days filming at Argumenty i Fakty newspaper, back then in the Guinness book of record for the world’s largest print run, more than 33 million copies every week, with its steady diet of stories highlighting the failure of the communist system to deliver you name it -- housing, health care, education -- or just plain food.
“We, the Soviets, can put a man, or a woman, or a dog in space, but not sausage on the table,” the editor said memorably to our TV camera. “Our readers know and love the truth when they see it. And the truth, that’s what we give them.”
“Truth has become a moveable feast in our world.”
Yet, hearing the Nobel committee the other day, I kept thinking this is not just about dictatorial governments in the Phillipines and Russia. It’s about us too. And the way the truth has become a moveable feast in our world. How facts have become a matter for debate, then argument, then absolute standoff. How the meaning of that which stares us in the face can be left to one’s interpretation.
Then I thought of a truth-teller in the very heart of our supposedly first world, in Washington DC, whose work had also been nominated this year for the Peace prize. His name Charles Lewis. Charles, like me, worked for mainstream media, the American TV networks, he was once a producer on the weekly blockbuster “60 minutes” programme, “telling like it is.”
Lewis gave it all up, to create first one foundation, then another. The Centre for Public Integrity was his first, blowing the whistle on the way Washington politicians, even the Presidency, could be bought by the power of corporate largesse, even individual wealth. His first book, “The Buying of the Presidency,” became the template for a series of reports that won me and ITN’s Channel Four News awards in the rare world of New York TV festivals.
A later book, titled “935 Lies,” chronicled the deep well of falsehoods offered by George Dubya Bush as the United States led others, think Tony Blair, into the invasion of Iraq. Lewis and his team (full disclosure: my eldest son was his lead researcher) established that Bush and seven advisers lied that number of times, provably, on the road to war, “with shameless manipulations and misrepresentations.” No wonder that later boss of mine, Kofi Annan, called the Iraq war “illegal...just wrong.”
Lewis’s second creation, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, ICIJ, has been the lead actor first behind the Panama Papers, then more recently behind the explosive Pandora Papers, exposing the financial machinations of a cast of characters that range from Middle East Kings, to African Presidents, to Russian oligarchs who give money to Britain’s politicians. Let’s just say their denials convince almost no one.
I found Lewis typically gracious about the work of others, quietly exultant about the prize just awarded to trail-blazers in Manila and Moscow. “When one of us succeeds, we all succeed.”
I can’t help thinking it’s a shame that his organisation didn’t make the Nobel podium too this year. Because then the message would have hit home, so much closer to home. That truth-telling lies at the very heart of our own well-being as democracies. And yes, truth is under threat, “a precondition for democracy and lasting peace” as the Nobel committee warned, surely in need of such truth-tellers as Maria, and Dmitry in one world, and Charles in another.
