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Ninety years ago, a young Welsh investigative journalist uncovered the Soviet Union’s genocide in Ukraine, Stalin’s attempt to stamp down on rising nationalism. The Holomodor, as it became known, was responsible for the deaths of some 4 million Ukrainians through deliberate starvation.
Gareth Jones’ eyewitness reports, gathered at significant risk, were initially disbelieved and dismissed at a time when many in the west were supportive of Stalin as a potential ally against the growing Nazi threat in the early 1930s. It was only later, after the journalist was murdered in murky circumstances, that the full scale of what had taken place was recognised.
Jones, a linguist and political advisor before he turned to journalism, has become the subject of a feature film, several documentaries and numerous biographies. Yet his achievements, which hold lessons for today’s reporters, are still not well known.
Jones was born in Barry, south Wales, in 1905. His mother had worked in Ukraine as a tutor to the Hughes family, Welsh steel industrialists, who had founded what is now the city of Donetsk.
He had a talent for languages and graduated from Aberystwyth University with first class honours in French and then later from Cambridge with another first in French, German and Russian. In 1930, he was hired as a foreign affairs advisor to the MP and former prime minister David Lloyd George while also developing his freelance journalism.
In early 1933, Jones was in Germany covering Hitler’s rise to power. He was there on the day Hitler was pronounced chancellor and flew with him and Goebbels to Frankfurt where he reported for the Western Mail, a Welsh daily newspaper.
In March 1933, he made a third and final trip to the Soviet Union. He had earlier reported more explicitly than most on the economic crisis and starvation that was emerging. This time, he went undercover into Ukraine and kept notes of all he saw:
I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread. We are dying.” This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
The report was denounced by the Soviets and also in the New York Times by its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty. It was an early example of crying “fake news” to undermine uncomfortable truths.
Jones rebutted the criticism with a detailed analysis of the famine and its causes – but the mud stuck. He was banned from the Soviet Union and returned to Wales, unable to find work with major newspapers until he met the American press magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had bought St Donat’s castle, a few miles from Jones’ home in Barry and supported him by publishing his articles in full.
The following year, he embarked on a world tour, focusing on Asia. He spent time in Japan and then went to China, moving on to Inner Mongolia with a German journalist. The pair were kidnapped by bandits and held hostage.
Jones’ body was found in August 1935. He had apparently been shot the day before his 30th birthday. Biographers have pointed to circumstantial evidence that the Soviet secret services, the NKVD, were involved in his kidnap and murder as revenge for his reporting. But there is no concrete proof of this.
Lloyd George paid tribute to him in the London Evening Standard newspaper following news of his death:
That part of the world is a cauldron of conflicting intrigue and one or other interests concerned probably knew that Mr Gareth Jones knew too much of what was going on. He had a passion for finding out what was happening in foreign lands wherever there was trouble, and in pursuit of his investigations he shrank from no risk. I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many. Nothing escaped his observation, and he allowed no obstacle to turn from his course when he thought that there was some fact, which he could obtain. He had the almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered.
Today, as another generation of journalists reports on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Jones’ story holds a number of relevant lessons. Even as we are swamped with digital media, there is no substitute for eyewitness reporting and for reporters taking the risks to see for themselves what is happening.
Attempts to hold power to account will often be meet with denial – including from other media – but cries of “fake news” must be countered with hard evidence.
Reporting can be a dangerous occupation. The press watchdog, Committee to Protect Journalists, reported that 67 journalists had been killed last year – including 15 in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Despite the risks, international reporting is as essential today as it was in the 1930s when Gareth Jones set out to tell the world what he had seen.
Richard Sambrook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
What’s the difference between a state broadcaster and a public broadcaster? The dispute over the close relationship between the BBC chairman, Richard Sharp and the former prime minister Boris Johnson, has seen some people – including on one occasion a BBC presenter – refer to it as a “state broadcaster”. The BBC is usually called a public service broadcaster (PSB) – and other PSBs around the world still look to the UK model as an example of good practise. The difference is significant and matters.
The formal distinction seems straightforward. State broadcasters – as found in countries such as China, Iran, parts of the Middle East and increasingly eastern Europe – broadcast in the interests of the state. They have leadership directly appointed by the government, high levels of government editorial control or censorship, direct political funding, and are directly accountable to the government.
Public Service broadcasters, meanwhile, operate in the interests of the wider public. They enjoy editorial independence from government and are usually funded via some sort of mechanism designed to insulate them from direct political control but provide a degree of open accountability to the public that funds them. How that is achieved, however, can be complex and involve compromises.
The latest debate over political influence at the BBC raises some difficult questions about independence and accountability.
Public broadcasters need to demonstrate they are impartial and not politically aligned or directed. At a moment of highly polarised politics, with the increased scrutiny and criticism it brings, this is difficult. Users from both the left and the right regularly criticise the BBC for not representing the world as they see it.
Read more: The controversial business of researching BBC impartiality
As a consequence, the BBC has suffered a decline in trust in its services. With that comes scepticism about its impartiality and independence.
Traditionally, the BBC – like other public institutions – has enjoyed editorial and operational autonomy while being institutionally accountable to government through the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the National Audit Office (NAO) and parliamentary select committees.
For decades it was overseen by a government-appointed board of governors, separate from the management. This mutated in 2007 into the BBC Trust – still separate from management but with greater resources to scrutinise the executive.
In 2016, David Clementi, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, undertook a further review of the BBC’s governance. He recommended a unified board, with management and non-executive directors around the same table, and a chairman appointed by government. Separate oversight moved to the media regulator Ofcom (whose chair is also government appointed).
For most of its 100 years, a form of direct government appointment of non-executive governors, trustees or directors has been the norm. It has largely worked. Even when the World Service was directly funded by government, it was widely recognised that its journalism was independent.
But in the current climate of distrust in both media and the UK government, such arrangements are increasingly interpreted as interference. The BBC sometimes attracts accusations of being closer to state broadcasting than a model accountable to the public.
The suspicion is less about direct political interference than soft influence through appointments such as Sharp as chairman shortly after he brokered a £800,000 loan for the then prime minister and the appointment of non-executive directors with recent government experience including Robbie Gibb, formerly director of communications for then Conservative prime minister Theresa May.
Governments of the past have often appointed those they believe to be politically sympathetic. But there is a sense that the current Conservative government has taken Margaret Thatcher’s famous inquiry of “Is he one of us?” to new levels.
The BBC’s management has been openly focused on impartiality – largely interpreting this as political. The chairman is on record as saying he believes the BBC’s staff have a soft-left bias which needs addressing.
Their problem is that the current crisis demonstrates that impartiality is as much about independence and accountability as it is about political balance. And those are harder to measure.
Further, the unified board means those responsible for demonstrating the BBC’s editorial independence on air, by reporting on itself, are around the same table as colleagues trying to defend the corporate interest. Chinese walls were easier when the governors or trustees sat separately from the management.
To stem further decline in trust, the BBC will need to demonstrate political independence at the highest level – beyond what has been required in the past. And it needs to find ways of demonstrating broader public accountability beyond Parliament and watchdog Ofcom. The public cannot practically oversee the BBC – but greater openness away from the committee rooms and boardrooms of London would help.
Some senior executives at least recognise this. The new CEO of BBC News, Deborah Turness, announced on her arrival she wanted to bring greater transparency to how news judgments are made. In an all-staff email she said:
The question I would like to ask you all to think about here, is this: to ‘the pursuit of truth with impartiality and accuracy’, how might we credibly add, ‘and with transparency’ – to lead the world in delivering what consumers say they need, if they are to continue to trust us.
Greater independence, open accountability and transparency in operations are hard things to deliver. But they can reassure the public and build trust, they are increasingly recognised as core elements of the impartiality expected of a public broadcaster, and needed to insulate them from any misguided accusations of straying towards state broadcasting.
Richard Sambrook worked for the BBC for thirty years, finally as Director of Global News and the World Service.
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