Reithian Pendulum

Covering events for TV news has changed. Going places with a big camera isn't popular anymore. I started out roaming the streets with a big camera for the international media in South Africa in the early 1990s. Nelson Mandela had just been released and South Africans - black and white - were giving birth to the rainbow nation. In those days the big camera played a vital role in that birth and been seen with it meant good was around because some one was watching. Nowadays the mood has turned around. The big camera is seen as part of the establishment and it’s seen as bad. I first became aware of the mood change at the anti-war march in London in February 2003. To Londoners protesting it seemed the big camera was part of what they were protesting against. A barrister, who is good at dealing with facts might not easily find an argument to support this mood. Broadcast executives and editors will also have trouble understanding it. As journalists we are all taught, and we teach to tell both sides of the story. Balance, truth and accuracy, impartiality and a diversity of opinion are all part of our guidelines. So if we are following the guidelines then where have the big cameras gone wrong and why has the mood changed? Below are two different examples and stories I have filmed recently. This is my brief experience of them, and perhaps they offer an explanation.

I filmed an interview with the almost President of the United States, Al Gore. He was attending an environmental conference in Cambridge and agreed to the interview. It was said to be the first time he'd give an interview to discuss a controversial Channel 4 documentary on global warming called, The Great Global Warming Swindle. This film was the definitive response to Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore's film is spent explaining the urgency needed to change our ways to save the planet because we are destroying it, while Channel 4's film says, "it's not our fault". The interview was also an opportunity for Gore to defend the accusations in the press that he didn't have such a cool carbon footprint himself. Needless to say the interview didn't go down well. Gore didn't like the questions that were asked and he told us so. He implied that we were fuelling a sensational but worthless debate about climate change and doing so would slow down people changing their ways to save our planet.

On another job I was surprised to find the old mood for the big camera back. It is rare nowadays but here people respected it. I was in Oxford, one of the recent worst hit flood areas in the UK. Residents, going through their own turmoil offered to be interviewed and pointed to areas I should film. I was offered free sausages, along with the firemen, police and Environments Agency. A regional cameraman filming for ITN suggested it was the spirit of the blitz.

Why was the mood so different? As far as the floods go, when television has a precise job to do such as in those times of national crisis, instinct kicks in and it does the job well. However, in the global warming debate Al Gore claims that the only skeptics left are the media. Why? Perhaps television is bent on sensation and egotism. Perhaps television is failing to see the wider picture and forgetting that even clever societies need guidance not just balance, impartiality and diversity of opinion. Through the ratings debacle a certain wisdom has been lost and with that television has losts its editorial role to air guidance from those with foresight and wisdom.