On Start the Week Tom Sutcliffe discusses the writing of war and conflict. The journalist Patrick Cockburn looks back at his years covering crises in the Middle East, especially the rise of the so-called Islamic state. The Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran looks at the difficulty of reporting in a country where press freedoms are severely curtailed and asks whether fiction and poetry are a way of telling a more truthful story. The legendary American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh first gained recognition in the 1960s for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War and has spent his career uncovering wrong-doing at the highest level. But reporting is changing and the academic Charlie Beckett celebrates the rise of citizen journalism.
Producer: Katy Hickman.