Bin Laden’s least likely legacy: our submission to authority

It was depressing beyond measure. It was one thing for an uneducated peasant in the Punjab to believe this guff, quite another for an educated Machiavelli.

I daresay none of this will come as a surprise to readers of the JC. Nobody with connections to Israel could be blind to the malignancy of violent Islamism in the 1990s. But the rest of us had nary a clue. Even someone like me, who grew up in Bradford, where militants we would learn to call ‘Islamists’ burned Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988, terrorism in the name of Islam was something which happened to people in the Middle East. Not in New York.

Given how many lives ended that day, and have ended because of it since, it seems flippant to think about how it also changed the direction of many careers. But describing how it changed mine, also tells another story. About how 9/11 changed journalism.

In the summer of 2001, I was forging a career as a political correspondent for Sky News. I’d been following Tony Blair’s re-election campaign, criss-crossing the country with his ‘battle bus’. My future seemed tied to Westminster and a life in the Lobby.

I was in Sky’s Westminster studios when the planes hit. All the news was coming out of America and although I had nothing to do, my late wife Joanna Roughton was busier than ever. Jo was Sky’s Head of Foreign News, trying to work out how to get reporters into America’s closed air-space. Suddenly, there weren’t enough foreign correspondents to go around, so I was sent to Pakistan. I spent two months there and then in Afghanistan.

Over the next five years I effectively became a war correspondent, spending months in the Gulf and Iraq. My last big conflict was Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 2006, after which I became a studio presenter.

How did it change the media landscape? In many ways, but let me focus on just one. For years a small cadre of war correspondents had cornered the market in relatively small-scale conflicts. The Balkan Wars had given way to boutique skirmishes in places like Sierra Leone and Somalia. After 9/11 I heard one veteran correspondent announce that foreign news was “back in business”. Tasteless, but undeniably true. But journalism’s adrenaline junkies also found their case undermined by what happened next. I for one had no time for the vainglorious grandstanding of war correspondents after 9/11, especially after hundreds of young British soldiers were sent to fight and die in Afghanistan and Iraq. They did so for low pay, without the comforts afforded by a five-star hotel, or the rewards of a glitzy award ceremony. No option to leave on a whim once a six-month tour had begun.

In short, it was hard for a self-gloryifing war correspondent to talk up the valour of their exploits, often little more than putting on a flak vest from a hotel roof, when 19-year-old privates were being regularly blown up by IEDs.

Of course there were dangers. In Afghanistan my cameraman had to buy a gun on the black market for our own protection. A journalist in a neighbouring house was shot dead by bandits. In Iraq, four of my fellow journalists embedded with the US Third Infantry Division died. But, for the most part, the dangers were over-stated. Where they existed, particularly in the months after 9/11 (when, truth be told, I did see some conflict-zone gonzo journalism) they were soon eradicated. Big media corporations got nervous about war correspondents. Risk assessments and hostile environment courses and ex-special forces minders became de rigeur.

Much of that was welcome, but the subliminal message was that the judgement of danger would be outsourced. Away from the front-line, from the story, back to head office. It created a mindset in big corporations that journalists were just like other employees, not set apart by their strange vocation for truth-telling. So now, if a media company tells its thousands of staff to avoid using pronouns or attend unconscious bias training courses, why should journalists be spared? The idea that the money men and women, the HR departments and diversity consultants, could tell reporters how to think would have been unthinkable before 9/11.

It reminds me of what Martin Amis wrote in his book The Second Plane, one of several contributions the novelist made to our understanding of 9/11 (a reminder of how few modern writers felt sufficiently brave or engaged to tackle to the subject). Amis lamented the passing of an era, what he described as “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”. It can feel a bit like that under covid lockdown sometimes. But Amis was right. It was our reaction to 9/11 which set in motion bigger changes in the relationship between the state and individuals when it comes to personal freedoms.

As a journalist, I’ve seen too many of my colleagues fall into line. We are a craven breed these days, cowed by many things; woke bosses and colleagues, cancel culture, the tiny economic rents now captured by the broken business model which is modern journalism. But it started with 9/11. Amis saw it. In the grey-faced officials at the airports, ordering people to take off their shoes and arresting those who tried to make light of terrorism or verbally challenge our newly empowered authorities.

It was Bin Laden’s least likely legacy. A massive Western sense of humour failure. A cosmic opportunity for priggish killjoys. A po-faced societal lurch towards the adoption of cognitive uniformity. A merciless refusal to accept a different way of looking at the world and a vile propensity to view those with whom we disagree as not just wrong, but bad. It’s been given rocket fuel by the internet. But it was 9/11 that provided the ignition.