Reporters who anchor themselves with claims of impartiality must not overlook the truth, argues this Pulitzer Prize-winner.

Hired for the summer from university, I returned one evening from a abortive assignment at city hall, complaining to the tough old Scot who was the paper's night editor that I had waited outside closed doors all evening, with not so much as a note to show for my time. The crusty fellow behaved for a moment as if he hadn't heard me, or decided I didn't merit a moment's distraction from the copy he was attacking viciously with his blue pencil. Then, without so much as a glance from beneath his green eye-shade, he pronounced his baleful verdict. “If you're going to make anything of yourself in this business, laddie, there's something you'd best learn right now,” he said. “Where the carpet begins, you halt.”

It was a while before I understood what he meant. (What carpet? City hall had no carpets, at least none I had ventured to cross). But in time, I came to understand that in George Patterson's world – and it was a view that seemed to come effortlessly to a Scot dealing with a newcomer he seemed to have typecast as an uppity young Englishman – a reporter was somebody who accepted his status as an outsider, who embraced this humble status and sought no favours, nor any grant of privileged information not accrued by perseverance and grit. The corollary, of course, was that with the outsider's role came an independence, a sense of not being owned by those we cover, and not owing them any special consideration.

I owe old George much for lessons (and there were many others) that I have had to learn, and re-learn, through the years that followed. But many years on, I remain especially indebted to him for the way in which his contempt for the would-be insider in our trade helped me navigate my own experience of the fleeting celebrity – faux celebrity, to be sure, and beyond any merit – that came with the years I spent covering the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because I appeared frequently on American television from sandbagged camera positions in Kabul and Baghdad, I began to attract the kind of out-on-the-street attention in the United States that more than 30 years of reporting from around the world for The New York Times had never earned.

He only remembered my haircut

But much the larger number of people who have approached me in my travels have been kinder, as well as more focused on the wars. And of the many things they said, the one I came to value most was when they said I had been fair, especially about Iraq, the war that was then, through the middle years of the decade, the conflict that was the more politically divisive. Hardly anybody, at least that I can remember, rebuked me for leaning too far one way or another in the debate about whether Iraq should have been invaded in the first place, or whether America should continue to fight the insurgency or come home – though repudiation of that sort then was a common enough experience for any reporter, at least any reporter working for an American publication, in the babel of the internet at the time. Fair… in a journeyman's life as a foreign correspondent, that has always been the treasured word. That's not to say that having strangers in the malls of America tell me they thought me fair means I had earned the commendation, for I know well enough that there are those among my colleagues, and beyond, who would dispute that. Rather, what those people said reaffirmed for me the importance of fairness as the indispensable standard, the base of all we do, as old George had told me those many years ago. And that's what all of us, surely, in our hearts, know to be true – that a reporter, to be worthy of the name, cannot be a polemicist, a partisan, or an ideologue; a missionary, an agitator, or an enlistee in a cause, however noble the cause may be, though all of these are found, to some degree, in many newsrooms. At best, a reporter is one who seeks out all sides of a story, or at least every side that matters.

If that seems like a pale and tedious commonplace, anybody who has worked as a reporter for a season or more can cite examples of reporters, some of them widely celebrated in their time and in ours, who have not notably placed fairness at the top of their priorities. Among those that spring to mind are the reporters of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal in the era of “yellow journalism” at the end of the 19th century, as also John Reed in the early years of Soviet Russia; a roll call of some of the best-known reporters of the past 50 years on both sides of the Atlantic will yield others, including a fair number on the political staffs of some of Fleet Street's redtops. To say that many of these have been men and women in the service of a cause, polemicists even, is not to deny them their place in the history of our profession; nor to deny that their passions made – and make – compelling reading; much less that they can be denied their impact on the course of great movements and events. My point is rather this: that much as they have accomplished, their work has been ancillary to the role of the vast majority of their cohorts, whose task has always been what the Arabs know as talibs – seekers, in our case, after at least some shade of the truth.

But if placing fairness at the foundation of our enterprise is the most prosaic of our rules, it is only the beginning, because what really matters is how fairness is defined. The common newsroom definition in my time has been that the reporter owes the reader a promise of impartiality, and that is incontrovertible, as far as it goes. But in the prevailing idiom of our times, that pledge has too often come to mean something quite different, and in its way opposed to the very ideal of fairness that it is intended to sustain. The problem arises when a reporter faced with a complex and controversial assignment, and there are none more so than war, determines that to be impartial requires an insistent neutrality, and the two – impartiality and neutrality – are not the same at all.

At about the time I first met George Patterson, I read in my philosophy textbooks of Dante Alighieri's injunction in the Inferno, reserving “the hottest places in hell to those who remain neutral in times of moral crisis”. Over the years, that medieval aphorism, as a guide to judgment and peace of mind in imperilled places, found its way into the pages of the leather-bound diary I carry with me on my travels, along with Rupert Brooke's poem The Soldier, with its elegiac contemplation, from afar, of the languid pleasures of friendships lived out “under an English heaven”; and the closing entry of Captain Scott's Antarctic diary, where he wrote of the risks that he and his companions took on their trek to the South Pole in 1911-12, and the obligation that laid on them, as they died, not to declaim against their fate. (“We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.”)

Artillery shells were raining down

To have stuck then to the neutral view might have served the notional ends of impartiality, but not of fairness, or of truth. And much of the reporting of the time in English and American publications, it's safe to say, was not, in that narrow sense of the term, impartial. Years later, there are still those, particularly among Serb nationalists, but not alone among them, who condemn reporters of the time for having enlisted in the cause of the Bosnian Muslims, as though we had made a choice of our champions, and our villains, without troubling ourselves with the facts. But the overriding reality was that on any fair weighing of the facts as we knew them, there was a truth we owed to our readers, and most of us reported it that way. To use Dante's standard, we had not remained neutral in a time of moral crisis.

Much the same could be said of the reporting from Baghdad before the allied invasion in 2003. Some critics say now, as they did then, that those of us who reported from Baghdad during the last passage under Saddam Hussein helped pave the way for the war waged by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair by too stark a representation of the murderous tyranny Iraq had become under Saddam, as though a truly “impartial” view would have been less concerned with the miseries inflicted by Saddam. Perhaps, as we now know, we would have done better if we had dwelled more on the deeply traumatised and fractured character of the society engendered by Saddam's brutalities, and how unpromising a terrain that made for the allied attempt to implant a parliamentary democracy, but that is another matter. To have “gone easy” on Saddam's gruesome repression to escape the charge of strengthening the case for war might have advanced the cause of neutrality, but not of truth.

A further problem with the neutrality that masquerades as impartiality is that it can be used to excuse a lack of forbearance – of the tolerance at the heart of 21st-century Western beliefs – when people are caught in our reporting crosshairs. To be neutral can too easily translate into a lack of empathy for the individuals entangled in the news. As often as not, there is little choice to be made: the man caught red-handed robbing a bank is a poor candidate for a reporter's restraint. But there are cases in any reporter's life when naming and quoting people caught up in the big stories of our time while innocent themselves of any wrongdoing serves no useful social or even journalistic purpose, while inflicting needless injury to the people concerned. In this, as in much else we do, anchoring ourselves in claims of a bloodless neutrality can fall a long way short of being fair.