Фрэнсис Кокберн: Жизнь и журналистская деятельность

British journalist (1904–1981)

Francis Claud Cockburn ('/k//oʊ//b//ər//n/ KOHbərn; 12 April 1904 – 15 December 1981) was a British journalist. His saying "believe nothing until it has been officially denied" is widely quoted in journalistic studies, but he did not claim credit for originating it. He was the second cousin, once removed, of the novelists Alec Waugh and Evelyn Waugh. He lived at Brook Lodge, Youghal, County Cork, Ireland. Cockburn was "a leading British Communist Party member", and by the 1940s, he was reputed to be a prominent figure in "the Comintern in Western Europe". Cockburn was educated at Berkhamsted School, Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, and Keble College, Oxford, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. At Oxford he was part of the Hypocrites' Club.

He became a journalist with The Times and worked as a foreign correspondent in Germany and the United States before he resigned in 1933 to start his own newsletter, The Week. It has been said that during his spell as a sub editor on The Times, Cockburn and colleagues competed (with a small prize for the winner) to write the dullest printed headline. Cockburn only once claimed the honours, with "Small Earthquake in Chile, Not many dead". No copy of The Times featuring that headline has been located although it finally appeared decades after the recollection in Not the Times, a spoof version of the newspaper produced by several journalists at The Times in 1979 during the paper's year long absence because of an industrial dispute.

Under the alias Frank Pitcairn, Cockburn contributed to the British communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. In 1936, Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, asked him to cover the Spanish Civil War. Cockburn joined the Fifth Regiment to report the war as a soldier. While in Spain, he published Reporter in Spain. According to the editor of a volume of his writings on Spain, Cockburn formed a personal relationship with Mikhail Koltsov, "then the foreign editor of Pravda and, in Cockburn's view, 'the confidant and mouthpiece and direct agent of Stalin in Spain'". Cockburn's reporting in Spain, as "Frank Pitcairn", was heavily criticised by George Orwell in his 1938 memoir Homage to Catalonia. Orwell accused Cockburn of being under the control of Stalinist handlers and was critical of Cockburn's depiction of the Barcelona May Days in which Orwell had taken part and during which anti Stalinist communists and anarchists were caught and executed by operatives of the Soviet NKVD. was alive and well after escaping to fascist territory. According to writer Adam Hochschild, Cockburn functioned as Stalinist propagandist during the war "on [Communist] Party orders". In one instance, Cockburn claimed to have been an eyewitness to a battle that he totally invented. This hoax was intended to persuade the French prime minister that Francisco Franco's forces were weaker than they appeared and thus make the Republicans seem worthier candidates for help in obtaining arms. The ruse worked, and the French border was opened for a previously stalled artillery shipment.

In the late 1930s, Cockburn published a private newspaper, The Week, which was highly critical of Neville Chamberlain. Cockburn maintained in the 1960s that much of the information in The Week had been leaked to him by Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. Watt used as an example the claim The Week made in February–March 1939 that German troops were concentrating in Klagenfurt for an invasion of Yugoslavia, which Watt states to have had no basis in reality. and Jericho Road. Beat the Devil was made into a film in 1953 by the director John Huston, who paid Cockburn £3,000 for the rights to the book and screenplay. Cockburn collaborated with Huston on the early drafts of the script, but the credit went to Truman Capote. The title was later used by Cockburn's son Alexander for his regular column in The Nation. He published Bestseller, an exploration of English popular fiction, Aspects of English History (1957), The Devil's Decade (1973), his history of the 1930s and Union Power (1976). His first volume of memoirs was published as In Time of Trouble (1956) in the United Kingdom and as A Discord of Trumpets in the United States. It was followed by Crossing the Line (1958), and A View from the West (1961). Revised, they were published by Penguin as I, Claud in 1967. Again revised and shortened, with a new chapter, they were republished as Cockburn Sums Up shortly before he died. He also wrote Mr. Mintoff Comes to Ireland. The book was published in 1975 but set in 1980 when Dom Mintoff was Malta's Prime Minister and leader of the Malta Labour Party. The cover description describes it as a "shrewd assessment of how a small independent nation may best stand up to the so called Great Powers".