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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 6. 4th April 1973

Burchett: a Journalist who Made up his Mind

Burchett: a Journalist who Made up his Mind

Photo of Burchett

(See pages 7,8,9,10)

"My concept of reporting is not just to record history but to help shape it in the right direction. In the world of journalism and writing there is room for many different concepts and different roles of journalism. The field which I chose for myself was to move into areas of world importance and events of world importance to investigate to the fullest extent possible, decide what is right and what is wrong in the thing, and support the cause which I find is the right one. In the sorts of situations in which I've been dealing it's not been too difficult to assess what is right and what is wrong. My first real reporting was in China at the time of the Sino-Japanese war, where it was clear that for all the weaknesses and all the faults, and all the horrible faults of the Kuomintang regime in China, the fact was that China was the victim of Japanese aggression. The Chinese people had to be supported in their fight regardless of the ideological content of that regime. And so I did support them whereas lots of other people would say, "well they're both right and they're both wrong', or 'China is an introspective sort of society', or 'Japan is dynamic and has all these sorts of problems', and so on. Well I think that sort of balancing act is wrong, and it's not my concept of journalism.

I think you have to find which side is right. I suppose I'm as much of a publicist as a journalist, and I was confronted with the same thing when I went to have a look at the war in Indochina for the first time. It was clear that the Vietnamese were fighting for their independence while the French were trying to re-impose a particularly odious sort of colonialist regime, so I supported the Vietnamese people and supported them in the most effective way I could devise. But always dealing with facts. It's essential to deal with absolutely objective facts in a situation to bolster the cause which you are defending. But I'm not saying, and I've never said, that's what all journalists should be because there are other types of reporting. Somebody might go into a court for instance and he has to report the objective facts on each side of the case. But in many cases, where the issues are very clear, and the world is being informed almost entirely of the other side of the case, I think it's very important that a voice or two, a lone voice or two, should try and correct that imbalance by going all out to present the side of the case which he or she considers is the just one".