JA MacGahan
Reporter, Daily News
The man responsible for the greatest
piece of reporting of all time. After having made his reputation as a
fearless foreign correspondent in France, Central Asia and the Arctic
(which he sailed in a wooden boat), MacGahan was contacted in 1876 by the
Daily News of London. The paper had reported rumours of Turkish
mercenaries massacring thousands of villagers in what is now Bulgaria, and
the paper was now being challenged, by the British prime minister among
others, to put up or shut up.
MacGahan was commissioned to go to the
Balkans and report what he found. After days of riding and investigating
and interviewing hundreds of survivors, he was able to report, with
detail, precision and confidence, wholesale butchery of at least 15,000
Bulgarian men, women and children. His main story, from the remains of
what was once Batak and its inhabitants, began:
“Since my letter of yesterday I have
supped full of horrors…”
and continued:
“We are told that 3,000 people were
lying in this little churchyard alone…There were little curly heads
there in that festering mass, crushed down by heavy stones…little baby
hands, stretched out as if for help…mothers who had died trying to
shield their little ones with their own weak bodies, all lying there
together, festering in one horrid mass. They are silent enough now. There
are no tears nor cries, no weeping, no shrieks of terror, nor prayers for
mercy. The harvests are rotting in the fields and the reapers are rotting
here in the churchyard.”
MacGahn’s reports proved two
governments to have been systematically lying, provoked worldwide outrage,
and so led to the declaration of a war, the redrawing of the map of
Europe, and the creation of four new nations. Bulgaria was among them, and
today, more than a century and a quarter after his death at 34 from
typhus, MacGahan remains a hero in that land. Journalism, however, has
forgotten him.
