Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  At least terrorism had largely been consigned to history in Northern Ireland. The Belfast terror tour that I made sure to embark on shortly before joining the BBC had now become a heritage trail. Sinn Féin has even set up a gift shop on the Falls Road selling mural mousepads, Republican resistance calendars and IRA fridge magnets.

  Moreover, we could ponder the relative success of the peace process in fashionable, glass-fronted restaurants in city-centre streets once completely disfigured by the flying shrapnel of car bombs. In another unlikely twist, former Republican paramilitaries, such as Martin McGuinness, entered into a power-sharing arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Féin’s long-time enemies and Northern Ireland’s most faithful practitioners of the politics of ‘No’. Why, the queen could even visit Dublin, resplendent in emerald green.

  In a country with a fixation with heritage and nostalgia, there were so many post-somethings. Outside of the arts and fashion, perhaps Britain had lost the knack of being pre-something. Yet winning the right to stage the Olympics in 2012 presented the chance to redefine itself with a forthcoming event rather than a landmark from history, such as the Blitz or the Somme. I happened to be in London on the night it edged out Paris, New York and Madrid, and there was a palpable sense of reorientation, especially among the young. Then, the following morning came the 7/7 bomb attacks that killed 52 people and made Britons less eager future seekers.

  As for Australia, it prepared to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Lucky Country with many of the questions raised by Donald Horne still far from being resolved: the relationship with Asia, the umbilical ties to Britain, its receptiveness to new immigrants and the plight of the first Australians. On these issues, I would like to write that the country was in a state of suspenseful indecision, and in the midst of some impassioned national debate. However, it would be more accurate to describe the mood as one of apathetic irresolution.

  Because it is a building of such multiple entendres, I have always thought the Sydney Opera House serves as an ideal national icon. Through the international architectural competition that crowned an unknown Dane as its winner, Australia indicated how much more outward-looking it had become in the years after the war. New immigrants from southern Europe provided much of the manpower for its construction. Paul Robeson, the black American opera star, even performed an impromptu concert amidst the scaffolding and cranes, a musical foreshadowing, perhaps, of the end of the White Australia policy.

  In the selection of the foreign architect Jørn Utzon, at the instigation of the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, there were traces of the cultural cringe. The manner of Utzon’s constructive dismissal, an unintentionally unfortunate phrase, was also a reminder of how the creative and ingenious could be crushed by the leaden hand of mediocrity and stultifying conservatism. The building was funded partly by lottery money, hinting at Australia’s bawdy licentiousness, but the man who pressed originally for a purpose-built concert venue, Eugene Goossens, the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, ended up being arrested at Sydney Airport in the mid-1950s for carrying mildly pornographic material.

  The queen opened the new Opera House, reinforcing the constitutional link with Britain. However, an Aboriginal person also participated in those inaugural celebrations – a necessary nod towards the original inhabitants of Bennelong Point. By then, the Opera House had staged its first concerts. Sir Charles Mackerras conducted the prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on one evening and Rolf Harris sang ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ on another.

  Since then, the Opera House has been used as a billboard for anti-war protesters, while it also provided the stage for the visit of George W. Bush. It has served as a backdrop for everything from Spencer Tunick’s mass nudity to the final of Australian Idol, from the Olympics to Oprah. Its distinctive shells have also featured on all manner of corporate and cultural logos, from the Sydney Writers’ Festival to the demolition company hurling a wrecking ball at a row of turn-of-the-century houses opposite where I write – an act of architectural vandalism that seems, at once, against the original spirit of the Opera House and in complete harmony with its thwarted eventuation. But the overriding reason why the Opera House works so well as a national symbol is because it is unfinished and incomplete, and that this is met with public indifference.

  On the night of Obama’s victory, CNN used what it described as hologram technology to teleport a correspondent, Star Trek-style, from Grant Park in Chicago to its studio in New York so that she could be interviewed, face to virtual face, by the anchorman Wolf Blitzer. Though I am glad to report that the BBC continues to cling to the quaint notion that the point of having correspondents in the field is to leave them there, it showed the advances in technology that are continually speeding past our industry.

  Young reporters no longer wield razor blades and chinagraph pencils nor suffer from Uher droop. Instead, they carry pocket-sized digital recorders that could easily be mistaken for a cigarette case. The BBC Washington bureau can now boast more than the two mobile phones that we used to share between correspondents, and that had to be signed out whenever taken from the office. Everyone has an iPhone or a BlackBerry, or often both. Editing equipment that used to fill an entire hotel room has been superseded by inexpensive laptops. The satellite technology required to broadcast from anywhere on the planet can also fit in carry-on luggage, while in many places satellites themselves are entirely superfluous because correspondents can broadcast over the internet via a glorified version of Skype.

  The days are long passed when we used to race miles, or sometimes even fly, to reach a satellite-uplink station so that we could bounce our stories, galactically, back to London. All we need now are our own portable satellite dishes, which are smaller in size than a breakfast tray. Transmitting a news report from the field back to base has become much like sending an email with a hefty attachment, so we just need a decent broadband connection.

  Soon after joining the BBC, I remember an old hand in the newsroom who was something of a computer geek predicting that the future of journalism belonged to reporters who could master the logarithms of programming. How ludicrous, I remember thinking. But then came WikiLeaks.

  More so than any other advance, the internet has revolutionised our modus operandi. News is just a click away, and it’s incessantly updated with each blink of the eye. With the expectation that correspondents will file as soon as possible, deadlines have been drastically compressed and traditional news cycles have gone the way of the typewriter, the reel-to-reel tape machine and the newspaper copy-takers who used to sit at one end of a crackly phone line trying to decipher the dispatches of half-cut reporters in the field.

  In harness with new satellite technology, the worldwide web has also brought about one of the greatest breakthroughs in global news-gathering: the ability to broadcast from anywhere at any time. Alas, it is also responsible for one of the greatest threats to global news-gathering: the ability to broadcast from anywhere at any time. Because of the preponderance of continuous-news channels – the BBC has four alone – and the round-the-clock demand for material, this has been particularly pernicious. The unrelenting demands of having to file every hour of every day means that not as much time is allotted any more for what correspondents need the most: patient observation to divine a country’s underlying characteristics. On big, running stories, often journalists rarely get the chance to leave their rooftop live positions, from where they end up delivering fairly cramped commentaries based on fairly skimpy experiences.

  Watch any news channel these days and it will not be long before it serves up a promotional video boasting of its vast global reach and ability to respond to breaking news in an instant. Doubtless, you will be familiar with the genre: the fast-paced jump cuts, the global landmarks, the behind-the-scenes footage of gesticulating reporters, and the on-camera assurances from correspondents promising to fix news whenever it breaks – and from all four corners of the planet.

>   Yet there is a gulf of difference between the round-the-clock, round-the-world ability to broadcast and nuanced foreign coverage. Indeed, the very thing that news organisations now trumpet, which is to say their speedy reaction times to breaking events, is often a bar to understanding. Commonly, correspondents are summoned to their live positions to tell the rest of the world what is going on without being given sufficient time to properly find out for themselves. The BBC, which has always prided itself on giving correspondents the space and time in which to operate, knows this and tries hard to manage the demand from London. Still, reporters are being asked to do more for less, when foreign news should truly live by the maxim ‘less is more’.

  The one-click-away availability of information on the internet has also altered the balance of power between correspondents on the ground and editors in London. Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube and, to a lesser extent, Facebook have greatly empowered editors by giving them access to a vast quantity of up-to-the-second information. Yet information is not the same as journalism, and the process that turns one into the other has traditionally been where experienced correspondents have earned their spurs. Even the most self-regarding of foreign hacks would never be so presumptuous as to suggest they have a monopoly on understanding, but the act of being stationed for years in a foreign country, of reading its history and literature, of talking to its people, of poring over its newspapers every day and of sifting through its flotsam and jetsam does give them an edge. The view from our window generally offers a better vantage point than the view from the newsdesk in London, however many computer terminals or plasma screens it might boast.

  A larger danger is one of abdication: that continuous-news channels and online news sites allow others to set the agenda more than we do. So urgent and unrelenting is the demand for fresh headlines, angles, soundbites and real-time news events that there is a tendency to co-opt them from wherever they spring. Here, governments are the most gushing fountainheads, and spin doctors – those skilled practitioners of message management – have become expert at controlling the flow. They start with a leak to a newspaper that generates a friendly overnight headline. They follow up on the breakfast shows with another headline-making interview. Then they stage a pseudo news event, such as a visit to a military base, school or hospital, which they know the news channels will broadcast live and unexpurgated, and that will yield the additional benefit of providing friendly footage for the evening news.

  Editors are neither idiots nor supplicants and do not simply cede airtime to propagandists. A live speech from a president or prime minister, say, will usually be followed by the counterargument from opponents and some quick critical analysis from a correspondent or relevant expert. But they perform the secondary role of responding to the story rather than driving it.

  A supplementary problem is that reaction is often mistaken for scrutiny, and they are rarely equivalent. Reaction is instant. Scrutiny, like patient observation, requires time. There is a paradox here. Continuous-news channels have acres of airtime to fill, and some of it could easily be devoted to programs and segments that offer more thoughtful inspection and analysis. But the format that almost every news organisation has seized upon is all about the fleeting, breathless and occasionally exhilarating sensation of being in the moment and up to the second. Though there is no shortage of time, the newsfeed does not stop for seasoned reflection. It has become a medium of pulsating, audience-pulling graphics that read ‘BREAKING NEWS’ rather than ‘THOUGHTFUL ANALYSIS’.

  This partly explains one of journalism’s greatest failings after 9/11, a mega-news event that not only perfectly suited the televisual requirements of continuous news but that also coincided with the proliferation of round-the-clock channels and online news. In its aftermath, too many news outlets, especially in America, let others set the agenda, from the adoption of the Bush administration’s war-on-terror nomenclature to the framing of the post-9/11 debate as a battle between good and evil.

  Never was this more so in Washington than in the run-up to the war in Iraq, where a typical day might see US news channels switching from the White House briefing to the Pentagon press conference, from an Oval Office fireside sitdown, where President Bush would make the case for war or rail against the coalition of the unwilling, to a pep rally at an army base where the commander-in-chief would appear in a leather flight jacket to the cheers of whooping GIs. With the drumbeat for war an ever-building crescendo, so much American airtime was appropriated by prowar news events that dissenting voices were not just drowned out but also crowded out.

  There were other sins of omission, for the industry tended to follow a very narrow terror-centric agenda. When I arrived in South Asia, I was convinced that my biggest story would be the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leader’s eventual capture. But the war on terror was little more than an abstraction for many of the residents of the region, for whom there were far more pressing local issues.

  For countless South Asian shanty dwellers, whether in Mumbai, Kathmandu, Dhaka or Kabul, it was the daily scramble for food and shelter. To an Indian farmer in Andra Pradesh, drought loomed the largest. For a teenage girl in an impoverished Nepali village, sex trafficking posed the gravest threat. For an infant in the Afghan border region, it was the danger from discarded landmines. Violent Islam was irrelevant to a Tamil Tiger rebel railing against Sinhalese discrimination, or the family of a Colombo police officer killed by a female suicide bomber. Nor did it mean anything to young Nepali revolutionaries reared on the teachings of Mao. Pakistani leaders were preoccupied still with India, while India was increasingly preoccupied with China.

  We heard from these people and put their stories to air, but it was rare that they grabbed the headlines and took precedence over what was coming out of Washington. Again, there is a paradox here. In the age of continuous news, when technological advances made it much easier to report from far more places, we had both more time and the kind of extended global reach that enabled us to cover a much more expansive menu of stories. Alas, the post-9/11 news agenda tended to get narrower, with the White House and its war on terror the myopic focus.

  A corrective is needed here, for I do not want to paint too pessimistic a picture. Nor do I want these last words to be overly gloomy. Money and time is being invested still in lengthy assignments, especially in countries such as Afghanistan and China, where a correspondent and cameraman have the twin luxuries of escaping their live positions and roving faraway.

  For all the job and budget cuts – and they have been savage – the BBC abounds with quite exceptional journalists, whether in the foreign bureaux or at the mothership back in London. The decade has produced countless examples of brave and brilliant journalism. There are times still, as in Tahrir Square in Cairo, when rolling news doubles as rolling history.

  Though foreign correspondents face far longer days, far greater dangers and far heftier workloads, the great H. L. Mencken’s journalistic homily still holds true: ‘I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.’ But I wonder how many foreign correspondents can look back on the past ten years with a sense of unblemished pride at our efforts in navigating an ever more turbulent world? On both sides of the news industry, I suspect, this was a decade of unaccomplished missions.

  The first time I recall seeing the press working en masse was when reporters descended on a small terraced house in an inner-city back street of my home town Bristol, just down the road from the church I attended as a child. It was the home of Louise Brown, or the ‘Superbabe’ as the local paper christened her in its banner headline that evening, the world’s first test-tube baby.

  As a proud Bristolian, I was rather pleased with this fact, never thinking that 30 years on Fleur and I would come to rely on the same in vitro fertilisation technology. At first, we thought my years on the road as a foreign correspondent might be to blame for our difficulties in conceiving, an
d especially the time spent in South Asia. Male fertility is an indicator of general well-being, and I was badly rundown and horribly unhealthy when I came to Australia.

  In India, I had drunk way too many beers with droplets of glycerine floating at the top of the bottle, and consumed far too many curries swimming in ghee. After months of detoxification, a period of abstinence from alcohol and the nutritional benefits of Australian fresh produce, the problem was quickly remedied. But not, alas, our infertility as a couple. Still unable to fall pregnant, we feared the cause might be a more serious issue and, after a further year of trying, were told by a surgeon, in an uncomfortably matter-of-fact manner, that it would be impossible for us to conceive naturally. IVF was our only option.

  In these situations, news has a habit of intruding at the most unhelpful of moments. Needing to test my virility – as with Clinton’s impeachment, I am struggling here for euphemisms – I had booked in at a fertility clinic in Sydney where, such was the demand from 30-something couples, it took months to secure an appointment. When I was finally offered a slot, however, the Victorian bush fires were still aflame, which raised the spectre of having to race from the fire zone, catch a flight to Sydney, perform the necessary and then return to Melbourne in time for the breakfast-news shows in London.

  On the morning that Fleur started her IVF injections – a blend of powerful drugs that first tricks the body into thinking it is menopausal and then hyper-stimulates the ovaries into producing a welter of eggs – I had to be in Canberra to interview the prime minister, one of the few assignments near impossible to turn down.

  These problems aside, we soon got into the rhythm of the daily injections and the dawn visits to a clinic in the Sydney CBD where couples waited in hopeful silence for blood tests and progress reports on the production of eggs. Our first IVF cycle showed signs of real promise. Though we harvested a relatively small number of eggs, they were healthy and strong. After being fertilised, they combined to produce robust-looking blastocysts, the small bundle of cells that provides the first flowering of human life.