Gaza reporting and "round robins"

The disgraceful refusal -- so far -- of Reuters to sign up to the letter from more than 70 leading newspapers and media groups calling on Israel to allow international journalists into Gaza recalls an earlier era when the company's management declined to join in similar collective protests, dismissed by General Manager Gerald Long as "round robins."

The argument then, used by many governments today and perhaps inspiring the current Reuters leadership, was that quiet diplomacy and personal contacts were more effective.

Doubtful, at the least.

In 1974, following the expulsion from Moscow of two Reuters reporters (Julian Nundy and Dickie Wallis) and the refusal by the Soviet government to give a visa to a planned replacement (Roy Gutman) -- as well as actions against other foreign journalists actively reporting the Soviet dissident scene -- Long wrote an extensive private letter to
Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko protesting over the expulsions and the barring of Gutman, at the time a much-praised
Reuters correspondent in Belgrade.

The letter was sent to me as Moscow bureau chief at the time, with instructions to deliver it to the Foreign Ministry, which we duly did, despatching our veteran office driver Grisha to hand it in at the ministry's front desk. Foreigners were not allowed into the building without specific invitation. 

We waited a full week for a response, which we thought would at least come from the ministry's laconic spokesman Leonid Zamyatin, who became Soviet ambassador to London in the late 1980s.

But the ministry -- probably a decision by Zamyatin himself and certainly not Gromyko who probably never saw or was
told of the Long missive -- took another course.

Some 10 days after we had sent it, the letter appeared alone in the Reuters mailbox, its envelope creased and crumpled with no sign of having been opened or read. There was no accompanying response and no Soviet official would ever discuss it with me. 

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