In case you wondered where the quote comes from, it’s from Sir Harold Evans’ memorial address for reporter David Blundy (1945-89). It’s worth reading in full:

Is journalism worth dying for? One of David Blundy’s friends and colleagues asked the question when the tragic news came through. You could put it grandly: are truth and justice worth dying for? And, more bleakly, is a newspaper paragraph worth dying for?

It was, after all, a random bullet that took David’s life when he was out in that El Salvador barrio. He was simply trying to top up a story he had already prepared for the Correspondent. He had done what he was paid to do. The last paragraph, we feel with poignancy, was not going to change a thing. No scoop or subtlety of history hung upon it. It was a mortal redundancy.

And yet the unwritten paragraph is among the many sensitive tributes David’s true obituary. It represents the central thread of his life. There was just a chance the material gathered for the last paragraph might affect the balance of his story. To him, that was all that mattered. He was one of those reporters who give what we call the freedom of the press its moral energy. That moral energy is renewed whenever journalism enables people to make free, informed choices. It is destroyed when it does not.

But this one redeeming justification is the illumination in the shifting mosaic of news of fact and understanding that enables others to choose. ‘To make a picture of reality,’ as Walter Lippmann put it, ‘on which men can act.’

The whole of ethics is based on the presumption of free will and the freedom to make choices. David would mock the assertion that this is what he did, that he legitimised and honoured his profession. But he was in the front line of truth not so much because he exposed himself to danger as that he never ceased to expose himself to doubt.

This is a risk that some of us go to great lengths to avoid. There is a comfort in certainty. In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat. It is prudent to follow the office line. It is politic to take the handout. ‘Official sources’ say this and that … ‘Official sources’ most strongly deny … David always travelled light. His shoulder-slung green rucksack held barely a blade and a change of shirt. It was a metaphor for his approach to being a foreign correspondent.

His gift for comedy has been well and rightly celebrated, but his ragged persona concealed a very serious man. His values were those of a humanitarian liberal, but they were as open as his jacket. They had not ossified into convictions. He carried them with him wherever he went. If he did reach a conviction on an assignment, he would commonly bring it back like contraband, unwritten and undeclared, until he could put it to the test of a second and a third visit.

It is as well that he did not go abroad, as so many do, to discover what he knew at home. The reality in all the places was either more subtle or more brutal than the stereotypes and the confident commonplaces of our political rhetoric.

He took risks. It was typical of him to take the chance of switching from the established Sunday Telegraph to a new-born newspaper. His risk taking was not bravado; it was his preoccupation with the story on hand that so often bore him into danger. He used doubt as a tool of his craft. His nagging faux-naif perplexity acted like a truth serum on the resentments and suspicions of border guard, guerrilla and bureaucrat. Vulnerability was part of his appeal, but it was real enough when he came to set down what he had seen and heard close up.

Close up: as Robert Capa said of war photography, if your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough. It is a testament to the integrity of David’s endeavour that he hung his long frame over his portable for so long at such ungodly hours, scowling gloomily at his notebook. ‘Do you find a problem,’ he said, ‘in getting the words in the right order? . . . What’s it all about?’

Writing may be hard for everyone, but it’s easier to dazzle, shock and entertain than it is to get the words in the right order when you have set yourself in the rough urgent compressions of journalism to grapple with truth and get it read. Is my story accurate? Is it clear? Is it fair? Is it boring? David naturally doubted whether he met the tests he set himself. But he did, in deceptively simple prose. Some words he wrote for the Sunday Times from El Salvador in 1981 bear re-reading today:

‘Lolita Guardado was awoken at about 4am by a strange noise. There was the usual sound of persistent drizzle pouring from the roof of closely packed palm leaves and through the walls of mud and sticks. But outside across the Sumpul river she could hear men shouting. Groups of peasants gathered anxiously in the grey dawn to watch as Honduran soldiers formed a line on the far bank and ran to and fro carrying stones from the river bed. Only later that day, after her family, friends and neighbours had been slaughtered, did she fully understand why they were there.’

Philip Larkin, in Church Going, wrote: ‘…someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious.’ May we find that hunger in ourselves and in our dedication when we remember him with affection and with gratitude.