Penny Marshall (UK journalist)

Penny Marshall is a British journalist with ITV News.

Omarska

In the summer of 1992 Marshall, together with Channel 4 News' Ian Williams, were the first television journalists to uncover the Serb-run detention camps in Bosnia. Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian was also with the ITN teams.Their subsequent reports and pictures, shown throughout the world, generated an international outcry. The TV report won the International News Award for 1992 at the Royal Television Society TV Journalism Awards.

Penny Marshall has received Gold and Silver Medals at the Annual Film & Television Festival of New York, and joint top prize - with Ian Williams - in the News and Actuality category from BAFTA. They also received a special award from Broadcast Magazine. In addition they jointly won an Emmy, one of America 's top television awards, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism at last year's News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

Fraud Accusations

LM Magazine, formerly Living Marxism, in an article by Thomas Deichmann, claimed that the video tapes, which have brought international recognition to Marshall and Williams, were fraudulent. The article specifically said: "There was no barbed wire fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished. The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims; it is around the cameraman and the journalists." In a German television programme 'Kozarac - Ethnically Cleansed', broadcast on 11 October 1993, Marshall told German movie producer Monika Gras about the impact of the Trnopolje picture: 'That picture of that barbed wire and these emaciated men made alarm bells ring across the whole of Europe. I believe that the report would not have caused such a reaction had it been transmitted without that picture, although the facts would have been the same.' Marshall said that the Bosnian Serbs did not know how to deal with the Western press: 'It was a PR mistake in the Bosnian Serbs' terms.' She did not mention her team making any mistakes in their presentation of the Trnopolje story. [http://web.archive.org/web/19991110185707/www.informinc.co.uk/LM/LM97/LM97_Bosnia.html]

In March 2000, Penny Marshall and fellow reporter Ian Williams were each awarded £150,000, and ITN won £75,000, from LM Magazine in a High Court libel case against the magazine. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/677481.stm] In a 2006 interview, Noam Chomsky argued that the LM critique of the most publicized photograph from the footage was probably correct, and that the only reason why LM lost the libel case was because it could not prove that ITN had malicious intentions while publishing the story, which was required by the British libel law. As a very small newspaper, LM did not have enough money to fight batteries of lawyers representing ITN media corporation. [3]

Career

Penny Marshall joined ITN in 1985 as a production trainee, rising to become a general reporter in 1989. Marshall still works at ITN/ITV News, specifically reporting for "News at Ten". Marshall is married to fellow ITN journalist Tim Ewart, a former "BBC Newsroom South East" presenter and currently an ITV News correspondent.

External links

* [http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/livm-m25.shtml "Britain: libel verdict vs. exposé of Bosnia War propaganda bankrupts independent journal"] , World Socialist website, March 25, 2000
* [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_199705/ai_n8772603 "We did not fool the world": Richard Tait defends ITN against the charge that it is a giant bullying a dwarf] , The Spectator, May 24, 1997