First Saddam, now Gaddafi

 

After the dramatic YouTube videos of Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi is the latest deposed dictator to have his final gruesome seconds broadcast to world thanks to mobile phone video technology.

The footage is grotesque and, journalistically speaking, how much of it needs to be shown in order to satisfy what is ‘in the public interest’ (that old chestnut again) is a matter of opinion. For example, Channel 4 News chose to describe in words rather than actually show the bit where someone tried to sodomise Gaddafi with a piece of metal piping.

As well as a threat to the dignity of fallen despots, the ubiquity and ease of use of smart phone technology, combined with the speed of distribution offered by sites like YouTube, poses a potential dilemma for the traditional text journalist witnessing a breaking news event.

Do you concentrate on the normal business of news gathering, ie finding out what exactly is going on and gathering quotes/details from those involved? Or do you simply make sure you video it all on your smart phone and ping the video to your news desk for immediate upload?

After all, if you don’t, someone else surely will.

9/11 – Where were you?

It’s still hard to believe what happened 10 years ago in Manhattan. Nothing in your journalism training or work experience prepares you for dealing with that kind of story and I can’t imagine how I’d have responded had I been working in New York that day.

As it happened on September 11, 2001 I was heading in for a late sports sub-editing shift at Reuters’ Gray’s Inn Road HQ in central London. I noticed a slightly strange atmosphere as I approached the desk. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Have a look at this,” replied the colleague nearest to me and I fixated on a slow-motion (except it wasn’t) CNN image of a passenger jet slamming into the heart of one of the Twin Towers. It reminded me then and still does now of a shark attacking a boat. “It’s the end of the world,” my colleague added. Suddenly sport seemed rather meaningless.

This video of the CNN coverage at the time is remarkable for the way it shows how the reporters and news presenters struggled to grasp the enormity of what was happening.

The Feedback Loop

It’s that time of year again when devising the most effective — and manageable –  ways of providing feedback and assessment to ever-growing numbers of ever-more-demanding students becomes a major challenge.

Professor Graham Gibbs gave an inspirational lecture on the subject at the 2008 International Conference on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education in Singapore. Applying some of his suggestions to the teaching of practical journalism skills is not straightforward but I think it’s feasible.

In the public interest or just interesting to the public?

Here’s what the much-maligned  Press Complaints Commission (PCC) says about ‘the public interest’ defence in its Editors’ Code of Practice:

“1. The public interest includes, but is not confined to:

i) Detecting or exposing crime or serious impropriety.

ii) Protecting public health and safety.

iii) Preventing the public from being misled by an action or statement of an individual or organisation.

 2. There is a public interest in freedom of expression itself.

 3. Whenever the public interest is invoked, the PCC will require editors to demonstrate fully that they reasonably believed that publication, or journalistic activity undertaken with a view to publication, would be in the public interest.

 4. The PCC will consider the extent to which material is already in the public domain, or will become so.

 5. In cases involving children under 16, editors must demonstrate an exceptional public interest to over-ride the normally paramount interest of the child.”

It’s interesting to consider a lot of the content of tabloid newspapers in the light of this. For example, does the rider at the start – ‘includes, but is not confined to’ – offer an easy get-out?

Tags: code of conduct, ethics, news of the world, pcc, phone hacking, public interest

Hacked Apart

No doubt a great deal of damage has been done to the reputation of news gatherers everywhere by the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. It will be interesting to see what a new intake of aspiring journalists feel about it all this autumn. Has it put them off their choice of degree course? Or merely added a fresh sheen of notoriety to a career that is (wrongly) viewed as glamorous?

As a former news agency reporter my feelings are mixed. Tabloid reporters can be a pain in the arse for other journalists. It is quite common for their antics, for example quoting out of context or simply exaggerating the truth, to cause panic among media relations staff who then become pre-occupied with ‘keeping the red-top hacks happy’, at the expense of reporters from supposedly more respectable media organisations. I and my colleagues regularly felt the collective, wide-eyed fury of the tabloid reporters at the merest hint that we might not comply with their desire to hold back the juiciest quotes until after their print-runs.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some outstanding journalists working on tabloids, regularly digging out genuine scoops that are in the public interest, and at the NOTW they have now all lost their jobs over something the vast majority of them will have had little to do with. (Although in my very brief experience working as a sub-editor for News International years ago quite a few of the production staff actually worked on The Sun during the week and only at the NOTW on Saturdays, so it may not be quite as bad as it seems.)

However, as the focus turns to the looming prospect of a media regulation overhaul, it is the art of investigative journalism that could yet be the greatest casualty of this scandal. As The Sunday Times editor John Witherow explained in his newspaper last month, sometimes exposing the truth legitimately requires deception on the part of the journalist. As such, it is the definition of ‘what is in the public interest’ that is critical.

Tags: code of conduct, ethics, news of the world, pcc, phone hacking, public interest, Sunday Times

Coming soon…

Welcome to the brand new JOURNALECT blog,  a place to provoke thought and debate about journalism and journalism education. Copy of the News of the World anyone?