And Another Thing...: The Invisible Reporter
Arthur Loosley ponders the meaning of 'Being There' and suggests that we shouldn't always believe what we read.
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'Tell the news, don't make it,' I was told early in my newspaper career, but that is not always easy because just being there can sometimes profoundly affect the outcome of an event.
Journalists and especially photo-journalists, who need to be in the thick of the action, have to work hard to present an unbiased view while at the same time finding an 'angle' which will satisfy their editors and appeal to readers, although they often find themselves used or manipulated by pressure groups who create 'picture opportunities' which cannot be ignored.
I wonder how often the average newspaper reader or television viewer pauses to ask what really happened. It is easy to suspend disbelief, and we can easily be taken in by stock video footage inserted into live television news bulletins purely as eye-candy, just as at the cinema we can ignore the absurdity of a shipwrecked mariner drifting in an open boat in mid-Atlantic, apparently accompanied by a 40-piece orchestra.
I recall an incident closer to home during a particularly hard winter in the 1950s when a colleague and I set out across the desolate wilds of Derbyshire looking for a news angle on the weather. There was no shortage of snow, and we soon had to stop and get out of the car because a bus had skidded on a hill, partly blocking the road. The driver asked us to help him and his passengers to move the vehicle.
Bad move! We nearly became the subject of a story ourselves when the bus started to slip backwards with all of us behind it, so we abandoned the attempt and went on our way with nothing more than a picture of the bus and its stranded passengers.
A few miles further on, the road became impassable but we could see, across the fields, an isolated farmhouse with an inviting swirl of smoke coming from its chimney so we set off on foot to reach it. There was no visible track or footpath, and we found ourselves several times walking into obstructions hidden under the drifting snow, but we eventually reached the house where the farmer, his wife and two daughters gasped with amazement when they found us knocking at their door.
They had not been out for two days, they told us; the cattle had been brought into the sheds at the first sign of snow, but the sheep were still out there somewhere on the moors and the girls hadn't been able to get to school. Their story was worth the minor inconvenience of getting there, so after a chat, some photographs and a welcome mug of steaming cocoa in front of a blazing log fire, we were on our way again. They thought we were mad and I tended to agree with them, but life on a freelance news agency operates in a world of its own and with deadlines to meet, we had no time to stand and stare.
That was long before the days of digital photography or e-mail, and the photographs had to be developed and sent to London in time for the early editions of the daily papers scheduled for that part of the country.
There was no time to spare, although our agency did have the advantage of the leading-edge technology of the time, the telephoto wire machine, looking much like an old Edison phonograph. Pictures wrapped around a revolving drum were scanned by a small spot of light, sending electrical pulses down a telephone line. It was a slow process and error-prone because the analogue phone lines were susceptible to stray signals, wrong numbers and other interruptions which sometimes meant that the picture was scrambled and had to be sent again.
Fast forward now to next morning, when several of our national newspaper clients published the fruits of our labours and one tabloid made quite a splash of it with a story rewritten by a sub-editor in the paper's own style. The family in the photograph, huddled by the fire with their cups of steaming cocoa were, the readers were told, trapped in their isolated farmhouse and completely cut off from human contact. A distant photograph of the snow-bound house confirmed its inaccessibility.
Was this, I wondered, the ultimate achievement to which any journalist could aspire? Had my colleague and I really succeeded in making ourselves totally invisible?
Perhaps we weren't even there.
50 years on, now that technology makes the impossible not only possible but mandatory, perhaps we should have even greater reason not to believe everything we read.
