BBC World Service presenter Dan Damon said this on his BBC profile:
“I get most excited using new technology to produce live radio from hostile situations. Be it a roof in Gaza blasted by desert winds, using a slow mobile phone link to read scripts in an Istanbul mosque or propping a satellite dish on a car roof so Mexican voters give their views uncensored. ”
It echoes a lot of what we were saying in our presentation: that technology’s an empowering factor in journalism. Although I suppose you still have to think about the implications of non-responsible journalists having the same access to technology.
Its the same old ‘who regulates it’ question.
TI
March 1, 2008 at 3:36 pm
On this theme…
I’m reading Christina Lamb’s “Small Wars Permitting” at the moment. She’s been Foreign Correspondent of the Year 4 times and does a lot of corresponding from Pakistan.
Lamb talks about her frustration when she was one of the first to hear of General Zia’s death. She spent over an hour trying to dial the international operator, using a (rotating dial) phone belonging to the father of Peshwar’s mayor.
There weren’t direct lines to the hub office in 1988.
When she finally got through, she had to dictate all she knew down the phone line – and kept the line open for hours in case more updates came through.
Later that night someone set up a satellite dish on the roof and she gave a live link to ITN. Almost unheard of in those days.
Imagine a similar situation now.
How long did it take for news of Bhutto’s death to reach us as audience in the UK, via web, radio, streamed news and 24 hour tv? Ok, her death was very public, not a plane crash like Zia’s. But I can’t imagine a situation today when a world ruler dies and it takes over an hour for a newspaper journalist to phone the story out.
Had ITN not got in touch, that story might not have reached the audience until the following morning, when the paper went to print.
LC
March 13, 2008 at 12:06 pm
It’s similar with the world trade centre, the pictures made the story and imapct all the more intense. I know it was a massive and terrible event but I wonder how much less of an impact there would have been globally if people only learnt about it from pictures in newspapers. I remember so well the feelings I had when I watched live as the second plane hit and the towers fell, there is no way you’d feel like that with a radio report or a picture in a paper. To some degree I wonder how different the international response would have been without the coverage the event got.
TI
March 16, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I think we have to distinguish between immediate impact and analysis. Certainly stories such as 9/11, 7/7 or the assassination of Bhutto would not have generated the same kind of emotional response if it hadn’t been for the moving (as in film rather than emotional) footage. In the foreword to his book Johnny Got His Gun (an anti war novel published in 1939) Dalton Trumbo includes this rather indicative passage about the Vietnam War : “Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 dead Americans in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting we reach for the toast”.
So bare facts, abstract numbers fail to shock us at the same time we have a constant stream of gut wrenching images coming out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Dafur, Gaza, Tibet and any other political hot spot and yet hardly anything happens. We aren’t protesting picketing BAE or the like so I guess the question is whether there is any direct link left between news and activism on behalf of others?
March 16, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Again sorry that was EG