Proud tradition of ignoring the editor

COLLEAGUES of Attilio Bolzoni, Rome's La Repubblica's highly regarded Mafia correspondent, say he sets his own agenda in faraway Palermo. The editor, who knows as little about Sicily as most Dublin editors know about west Belfast, has little choice but to let him get on with it.

Closer to home, the northern editor of the Sunday World, Jim Campbell, and his colleague, Martin O'Hagan, courageously carried on lambasting the paramilitaries with damaging exposes long after Campbell was badly wounded in a UVF attack in 1984. His Dublin management only told them to lay off when the paper's Belfast offices were bombed eight years later and a swingeing threat against everyone involved in its writing, production and sale threatened to put it out of business in the North.

The deputy city editor of the New York Daily News, Kevin McCoy, says his paper had no particular policy, training or guidelines for reporters working on high risk stories. "We just tell them to follow their instincts, keep their wits about them and keep the editor on the news desk in touch with what's going on." Some of the best American journalists don't even do that. David Rohde of the Christian Science Monitor, who won a Pulitzer prize for the first eye witness account of last year's massacre of Muslim refugees at Srebrenica, did not tell his editor he was going to the east Bosnian enclave for fear he would be stopped.

In this, he was in a long and proud tradition of journalists acting on their own initiative - often in defiance of their editors' wishes - in pursuit of a difficult and dangerous story. The great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinki, bribed his way through burning roadblocks manned by mad eyed, hash smoking, machete wielding guerrillas to report on the Nigerian civil war. John Pilger took the last plane into a deserted Phnom Penh airport as the Khmer Rouge swept through the Cambodian capital's suburbs. Robert Fisk has regularly defied the fury of the Israeli government and the international Jewish lobby - and ignored his editor's warnings about his safety - to send back eye witness accounts of Israeli army atrocities in Lebanon.