Channel 4 News at 25: Jonathan Miller
Updated on 30 October 2007
He's covered conflicts, revolutions, and disasters around the world, but Foreign affairs correspondent Jonathan Miller pays homage to fellow journalist Martin Adler when choosing his best moment of Channel 4 News.
'Charlie Company' by Martin Adler
This film - commissioned by the Channel 4 News Indy Fund - in which Martin embedded with the US Army in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, won the Amnesty Media Award in 2004. It's a classic piece of ballsy observational reportage, revelatory and shocking. It documents how the soldiers of Charlie Company secured a dangerous stretch of road, just south of Tikrit.
It was also vintage Martin Adler, a member of the elite of freelance film-makers. For weeks, he filmed daily operations at close quarters as suspects were manhandled and verbally abused. The Amnesty International Media Award judges called Charlie Company "incredibly prescient." To put it bluntly, it was a nauseating insight, a real eye-opener into what was going on in the first few months after the invasion of Iraq. It spotlighted the increasingly worrying attitudes and behaviour of some US soldiers towards those they'd come to liberate.
The film captured early signs of combat stress and fatigue among US troops. Martin showed exactly what was happening and no-one who watched Charlie Company could later turn round and say "oh, I never realised." As a film, it was indeed prescient, but as a warning, it was ignored.
Like so often with his films from the chaos of conflict zones around the world, Martin Adler was ahead of the pack with Charlie Company; his eye for a good story; his extraordinary access and stickability came with gritty characters straight out of central casting. Charlie Company was truly compulsive viewing. As with so many of his films, it isn't easy to watch. But it's one of his best.
Just two years after making Charlie Company, Martin was shot dead in Somalia. As a friend of many on our programme, he's still greatly missed; Channel 4 News lost one of it's finest contributors.
Martin Adler did much of his work through the Independents' Fund - set up as a vehicle for freelance television journalists - and over the past 25 years, they have produced some of the very best films broadcast on Channel 4 News.
