TV News 3.0: An insider's guide to launching and running news channels in the digital age by Zafar Siddiqi

Author:Zafar Siddiqi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Magpie Books

9

Let Me Show You A Story…

“The only qualities essential for real success in

journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.” Nicholas Tomalin

* * *

The TV journalist is a complex beast, often thin-skinned and egocentric, frequently a gossip, occasionally a whiner (about resources, money, lack of time, bosses, the weather, you name it). But they are commonly driven by an abiding passion to report the news, a dedication to break stories and are insatiably curious. And they are generally worth their weight in gold (though don’t tell them I said that or I’ll have a queue of them outside my office demanding pay rises).

Their story-getting and telling abilities, aided and abetted by their camera crews and other support staff, are the stuff of legends. The BBC’s John Simpson donning a burka to enter Taliban-controlled Afghanistan before the US-led attack in 2001. Bob McKeown, a correspondent for America’s CBS, being the first Western journalist to broadcast live from liberated Kuwait city in 1991. The same year as CNN’s Peter Arnett reported live from under a desk at the Al-Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad as air raid sirens blared and US bombs exploded around him.

Often the most compelling stories combine great reporting with pictures which do far more than illustrate the story. Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, once said “the news is the star” and the history of television news is one of compelling images which have moved the audience and sometimes changed the course of events.

On October 23, 1984, the BBC’s Michael Buerk reported on the appalling famine in Ethiopia which had been largely hidden from the world. Buerk’s reporting was powerful and compassionate - and I give an extract of that later as a good example of writing of the highest quality - but the global impact of the story owed as much to the great skill of his cameraman - Mohammed Amin, the brilliant Kenyan photojournalist - in portraying horror with humanity. The pictures led to an international response to the disaster.

On August 7, 1992, when ITN’s Penny Marshall and Ian Williams revealed the dreadful conditions in the Serb-run concentration camps of Omarska and Trnopolje in Bosnia, their reporting, together with that of their newspaper colleague Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, was a model of how to report evil and inhumanity - but it was the images of Fikret Alic and other terrified, emaciated Bosnian prisoners in the camps taken by cameramen Jeremy Irvin and James Nicholas which provoked outrage around the world.

With the digital revolution making cameras much lighter and less cumbersome, the growth of video journalism - courageous individuals often working unobtrusively on their own or with minimal backup - has become more and more the route to the exclusive stories that capture the headlines. Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, a Spanish corporate lawyer who became a war correspondent, was one the greatest of this select and courageous band. In 1999, at the height of the crisis in Kosovo, he filmed ethnic Albanian Kosovans

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