November 10 is the fourth anniversary of the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and freedom campaigner. He was hanged, along with eight other Ogoni tribe activists, after a sham trial on fabricated charges of conspiracy to murder, in 1995. As a result, Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth, and the Shell oil company, which Ken had relentlessly campaigned against, acknowledged that the executions had been a tragedy.
In the following years, Shell, which Ken had accused of polluting his homeland and of aiding and abetting killings by the Nigerian police in Rivers State, said it would improve conditions. It provided a water tower, a hospital and an ambulance, and claimed it was ready to talk to locals to try to improve community relations.
But Anita Roddick, the Body Shop cosmetics chain owner, who visited the area recently, says the oil giant's claims are rubbish, and that the Ogonis have seen no real improvement. In a letter to The Guardian newspaper in London, she confirmed that the water tower didn't work, the hospital had no drugs, and the ambulance was in fact a battered pickup truck. Medical staff had not been paid for six months, and operations could only take place when money had been collected from relatives for a patient's surgery.
So much for Shell's promises to clean up its act. It wouldn't be the first time the company had been accused of dirty tricks. In 1994, I tried to have a feature story broadcast about the pollution and allegations of murder in the Ogoni tribal lands. I'd been working as a producer at ITN, the British commercial news service, which has a stranglehold over Britain's radio and TV networks. It also has a cosy picture-sharing deal with CNN, and ITN World News was producing two half-hour programs going out to Europe and America daily on NBC Superchannel and the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States.
The story of Ken Saro Wiwa came across my desk when a documentary filmmaker claimed to have evidence of atrocities in Nigeria's Rivers State, the scene of Shell's massive oil operations, but also of massive environmental pollution and ruthless suppression of any protest.
But my feature was never broadcast, and it wasn't the only Ogoni story killed by ITN.
Because of the striking nature and obvious journalistic value of the pictures in his documentary, Glen Ellis, producer and director of the independent production house CATMA films, offered to let me have the pictures to air before his own film appeared on the U.K.'s Channel Four. This is unheard of in television news. If you have an exclusive, normally nobody gets to use it until you have shown it yourself. But Glen Ellis is no ordinary filmmaker. His documentaries on human rights abuses and industrial pollution have been shown to great critical acclaim. On this story, he felt the issues were so important that the message had to be spread by whatever means available.
I arranged an interview with Ken Saro Wiwa at ITN's sleek headquarters in London, and found the man unafraid of the Nigerian junta's efforts to intimidate and scare him off. He claimed that, for years, Shell had polluted and raped his homeland with little compensation, returning only a fraction of their vast revenue to ordinary Nigerians. As it pumped a million barrels of oil a day from the Niger delta, Shell was leaving the area a wasteland.
More seriously, he blamed Shell for encouraging the vicious military crackdowns whenever the peaceful Ogoni dared to protest. Their colorful rallies and dances had been brutally suppressed and 2,000 people had been murdered and dozens of villages burned.
I submitted the script and waited for the go-ahead. The reaction from the head of World News was staggering. After reading the story, he simply said, "Oh no, we couldn't possibly run this; Shell might sue us."
I'd read claims of TV companies suppressing stories for political or commercial reasons, and of newspapers censoring their own correspondents' copy, but somehow, like many journalists who come up against such situations in their own organizations, I hadn't believed that it could happen at ITN. I offered to excise all mention of Shell; we could just say, "Western oil companies," or concentrate on the Nigerian government's role. But the subject was quietly dropped and, perhaps not sure of my ground, I backed off from a confrontation with my new employer.
However, while reviewing library pictures of previous coverage on Nigeria, I came across an earlier piece written by another ITN reporter, Jane Bennett-Powell. I called her up and she told me that in October 1993 she had covered the Ogoni story for Channel 4 News (also produced by ITN).
Her story had been "checked legal," i.e., cleared for airing, but it, too, had then been dropped. The reason given that day was "news value." There was plenty of breaking news that evening and the piece didn't make the program.
That's not unusual in television. But it is rare for a feature piece to simply disappear and never be aired (although Bennett-Powell says she's satisfied her film was dropped for legitimate reasons).
When Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged by the Nigerians the following year, I was disgusted and angry with myself. My interview with Ken was the last before his arrest. At last, they ran part of it---as an obituary at the end of Channel Four News, with a freeze-frame of Ken's smiling face.
Last year, The Journalist magazine ran a piece about Corporate Television Networks, a part of ITN. CTN earns useful spin-off profits for the broadcaster by using its cameras and production staff to make videos for blue-chip firms like British Airways. When I read that Shell had been a major customer, commissioning videos to put across its side of the Nigeria story, something clicked into place. Was this the real reason for ITN's refusal to run my Ogoni item? Were they concerned about the oil giant's possible reaction to unfavorable coverage?
Stewart Purvis, ITN's Chief Executive, has defended the news broadcaster's activities in the corporate sector, arguing that the lines between news and commercial productions are clear and never crossed. But George Monbiot, writing in The Journalist, revealed that CTN bosses had admitted close relations with the news-gathering main body of ITN. One manager offered "briefings" with top reporters after Monbiot posed as an arms seller to Burma.
It was ITN that supplied the notorious pictures of emaciated Bosnian prisoners to CNN, which prompted U.S. involvement in the Balkans, leading, ultimately, to the Dayton agreement. ITN has won international prizes for its coverage of massacres, wars and famine.
But ITN still needs to come clean about CTN, and to explain why it refused to run the Ogoni story for so long. It must pledge never to let commercial pressure influence coverage of the activities of firms which also happen to be its business clients. If its reputation for impartial television news reporting is to continue, ITN must erase this stain on its name.
- Bruce Whitehead is a London-based freelance TV news producer and print journalist. He was a staff producer at ITN and CNN. His byline has appeared in The Independent, Financial Times magazine, and The Journalist, among other publications.
