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Interfering journalists

January 20th, 2010 · Posted by Skuds in Life · 22 Comments · Life

I saw a wonderful thing on the BBC News last night.  There was a piece about events in Haiti and the news team out there actually got involved.  Reporters in disaster areas often appear to be taking the approach of wildlife documentaries – recording events but not interfering.  For all we know they are always rolling up their sleeves to help people just after they have got their photo or footage of suffering, but we never see it.What was shown last night included a young girl in the wreckage and rubble of the houses who was obviously going into labour.  Her friends/family/neighbours laid her down ready to give birth.  It was not looking good for her and I was thinking to myself ‘are they really going to show this?’ and then the reporter said that the BBC insisted she needed to go to a hospital.

The girl was put into the BBC’s minibus, which raced to the nearest hospital where, after some complications the child was born and the mother survived.

It would have been so easy to not do that.  Footage of a girl having to give birth in the street would have been powerful stuff however it turned out.  It could have been the story of the happy miracle amongst the ruins or the human tragedy of the mother dying in childbirth or the baby dying – potentially iconic, award-winning footage, and yet the BBC intervened, leading to the much better, though less dramatic, hospital birth.

Old habits die hard and the camera crew, after getting the girl to hospital, did try to follow into the delivery room only to have the door very firmly closed in their faces, but I think we can forgive them that after letting human decency get in the way of a good story.

I hope their bosses thanked and congratulated them instead of giving them a good bollocking.

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22 Comments so far ↓

  • Andrew

    I love the BBC.

  • Skuds

    Same here.
    It educates, informs, entertains and now saves lives too.

  • Richard

    Pity that the BBC also has an unstated remit to PERSUADE through propaganda – ‘the manufacture if consent and necessary illusions” – a State Broadcaster rather than a Public Broadcaster.

  • Danivon

    Still, I suppose that tin-foil helmet helps you to block the most terrible propaganda, eh, Richard?

  • Richard

    Danivon, dearest, you are mistaking the “tin-foil helmet” for my head-phones – listening to this ol’ Beatles song 😉

    “Day after day,
    Alone on a hill,
    The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
    But nobody wants to know him,
    They can see that he’s just a fool,
    And he never gives an answer,

    But the fool on the hill,
    Sees the sun going down,
    And the eyes in his head,
    See the world spinning ’round.

    Well on the way,
    Head in a cloud,
    The man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud
    But nobody ever hears him,
    or the sound he appears to make,
    and he never seems to notice,

    But the fool on the hill,
    Sees the sun going down,
    And the eyes in his head,
    See the world spinning ’round.

    And nobody seems to like him,
    they can tell what he wants to do,
    and he never shows his feelings,

    But the fool on the hill,
    Sees the sun going down,
    And the eyes in his head,
    See the world spinning ’round.

    Ooh, ooh,
    Round and round and round.

    And he never listens to them,
    He knows that they’re the fools
    They don’t like him,

    The fool on the hill
    Sees the sun going down,
    And the eyes in his head,
    See the world spinning ’round.

    Ooh,
    Round and round and round

  • Rob Glover

    Pr0blem is Richard, that’s just what they want you to think.

  • skud's sister

    Richard, do you feel this way about all tv and radio? Whatever the BBC’s faults they seem to me to pale into insignificance beside the output of most commercial stations (and if it is just the licence fee then I will happily pay it just for the fact that David Attenborough exists and has existed).

  • Richard

    Problem is Rob, we are pitifully unaware of who “they” are – perhaps you could enlighten us with your greater wisdom 😉

  • Richard

    Yes, Skud’s Sister, pretty much “all” UK & US mainstream media – TV, Radio & Newspapers (BBC/ITN/MURDOCH’S SKY)(MURDOCH’S SUN, TIMES ETC).

    The Financial Times (Pearson) is probably the most accurate, with the least propaganda, because it is produced for those with the greatest power – and they need a paper to make the best decisions, based on correspondence with the facts & business realities.

    Just as an exercise – if interested – read the main headlines on BBC Ceefax, and compare that with the headlines on Al Jazeera UK.

    It’s quite an eye-opener.

  • Rob Glover

    The Illuminati! (Oops, a black helicopter has just landed outside).

  • Richard

    S###, a MOSSAD helicopter has just landed outside mine !

  • Richard

    That’s interesting, Jane, thanks too.

    Do you still have the notes ?

    The issue of “press bias” is fully covered in Chomsky & Herman’s ground-breaking “Five Filter Propaganda Model”

    http://gatwickcity.phpbb3now.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=145&start=180

    Very few, if any, Schools of Journalism cover this Model/Theory.

    So, to study Press Bias in O-level Civics is quite something.

    Perhaps all is not lost…

    • Skuds

      We went to a very progressive school.
      I studied advertising and westerns in mass media studies – much more fun.

      BTW did you realise that you can use the “reply” link on a comment to make sure your comment follows the one you are replying to instead of having it just appear at the bottom?

  • janeskuds

    Of course to make sure I covered all the bases (our daily paper was the Evening Standard…) I used to get the Socialist Worker whenever I could….

    • Skuds

      When I first moved to London I used to get Labour News, though I had to have it specially ordered.

      Once in a while I would look at the Morning Star. Very expensive though considering how few pages there were. Must cost more per page than the FT!

  • Richard

    Yeah Jane, that’s another way of attempting to achieve a balance – and get to some kind of truth.

    With the advent of the Internet, this can be done quickly by button-pushing – and it’s cheaper.

    When I watch BBC, I find myself dividing it into ‘Matrix News’ (from above) and ‘Non-Matrix News’ (not from above).

    It’s quite fun, but disturbing at the same time

  • Richard

    For me , the quickest over-view of news – if you have Sky – is to go to the News Channel and simply ‘Go Compare’ the scrolling subtitled news.

    For reasons of time & interest, I gravitate only towards BBC & Al Jazeera, but there is also Murdoch’s Sky News & Fox News (for comic entertainment), CNN, Russia Today, France 24 et al

    • Skuds

      Richard, do you make use of RSS feeds? That can save a lot of time.

      You can use something like Google Reader to aggregate feeds from various papers (and blogs – anything with an RSS feed) and can also do custom feeds or news alerts for key phrases or topics.

      For example, you could set up a feed to tell whenever any news source uses the words “Richard Symonds” .

      Even our local papers have an RSS feed

  • Richard

    I use Google Alerts – does that fulfil the same function as RSS feeds ?

    • Skuds

      Sort of. Depends how you set them up.
      However, when you define an alert you can ‘subscribe’ to it in Google Reader alongside other feeds (RSS or Atom).

      Another news source is Twitter and the good news there is that something like Google Reader can treat twitterfeeds like RSS so you don’t have to sign up to Twitter yourself if you feel above that sort of thing but can put (for example) twitter.com/guardiannews or twitter.com/crawleybc in it and get those updates alongside (for example) the feed for the Crawley Observer.

      Big difference is that reader won’t email you as Alerts can, but I find that if you are using a mixture of RSS, Alerts and Twitter you can at least use Reader to see them all in one place – alongside such essential RSS feeds as skuds.org/feed 🙂