Adventures in Correspondentland (46 page)

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, and 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.

The transfer stage, when the embryo is implanted through the cervix into the uterus through a thin plastic catheter, also went smoothly. By now, we had fallen into the trap that commonly
ensnares IVF first-timers, which is to say we were incautiously optimistic. Then our letdown came on the cruellest of days: New Year's Eve. But we limped into the New Year determined to have another go.

This time, we were far more pessimistic, even though our egg harvest had gone better; and during the dreaded two-week wait – the time between the insertion of the fertilised egg and the pregnancy test – Fleur was convinced we would come up with another negative result. Not patient enough to wait until our official blood test, we freelanced and bought a cheap pregnancy-test kit from the chemist's.

As Fleur handed me the plastic stick, I saw that it registered just one bold blue line. Failure. We had been through this agonising process on countless occasions before, but this time I lingered before throwing the stick away. There was now the pale hint of azure. Within a second, it had become a firmer shade of powder blue. Then light blue. Seconds later, it was bright and definitive: a lustrous shade of baby blue. False negatives are more common than false positives, so we were confident but still unsure. It would require a blood test at the clinic, which later that morning confirmed the certainty of pregnancy.

Given a November due date, I rather hoped that our newborn would arrive on Melbourne Cup day, thinking it might confer special powers like those imagined by Salman Rushdie at the midnight unfurling of the Indian tricolour. Presumably, the closer an Australian baby is born to three o'clock on the first Tuesday of every November, the better their tipping skills, bringing both enormous riches in later life and a mantelpiece buckling under the weight of invitations to cup-day luncheons.

Alas, the race that has such an immobilising impact on the
nation had much the same effect on our baby, who waited another week before making his move. By then, my wife and I were fully primed, having spent a happy weekend in the countryside learning various calm-birthing techniques and having completed our prenatal classes in Sydney. Here, I resisted the temptation to attend the ‘Beer and Bub' course, where advice comes with a few ice-cold libations, and relied instead on a delightful Melbournian woman who plied us with home-made fruitcake and called us ‘possums' and ‘darls' throughout. Her 40-minute simulation of the second stage of labour will live long in the memory both as an object lesson in natural birthing and as a journey into the lesser-known reaches of the Antipodean vernacular that would make an Australian slip fielder blush. Certainly, we will never look upon the frill-neck lizard in the same light again.

There were times when waiting for the start of labour felt a little like waiting for the start of the Gulf War. Shock and awe was imminent, but we did not quite know when. Here, you will have to forgive me for lapsing again into foreign-correspondent speak, but it exposes the occupational hazard of equating everything that happens to a news event, large or small.

Still, as we were soon to discover, the wonder of the birthing suite defies comparison. Taking more than 50 hours from first contraction to first breath, it was a long, agonising labour, complicated by the fact that our baby had assumed the proportions of his father and decided to spend the final hours of gestation luxuriating on his back in the posterior position. It meant that the contractions, rather than being metronomic and building to a rousing crescendo, had more of a syncopated rhythm, like improvisational jazz. Because backbone was grating against backbone, they were also unbearably painful.

In the face of this pain, however, my Australian wife was resolutely Amazonian – she resisted the temptation of numbing drugs – and a labour that started in the early hours of Wednesday morning finally came to happy fruition late on Friday afternoon. From the periphery of news, I could report back to Britain the most consequential story of our lives, and one that Fleur and I will never tire in telling and updating: the birth of a 10.9 lb boy. Bonny and smiling, Billy Bryant seemed the perfect name.

With the family over from Britain, our first Christmas could not have been happier, and so was the run-up to the New Year. Truly, the present was golden and the future brighter still. But on Christmas Day, I had made the mistake of listening to the early-morning news bulletin – a rookie error – and heard that a monsoonal trough had crossed the coast from the Coral Sea and was threatening widespread flooding in Queensland.

Immediately, I turned down the volume and made sure not to pick up a paper or turn on the television news for the rest of the week. But from that moment on, I had that unsettling feeling that my holiday would eventually be interrupted by a trip north of the border to the sunshine state.

All foreign correspondents reach the point, I suspect, when the very thing that once made the job so exciting and fun, which is to say its unpredictability, becomes its biggest drawback. Mine had actually come midway through the year of the disasters in South Asia, when a bomb went off in the pilgrimage town of Varanasi on the night before I was due to go on a holiday planned as a respite from bloodshed and suffering. Now, I felt the sensation more powerfully than ever before, as I took the inevitable call from London asking me to get on the next flight to Queensland and to leave my family behind.

The plane left in only a few hours, and the usual mad drop-everything-and-go scramble to the airport was followed by the usual mad scramble to get a piece to air before our competitors not long after we had landed. Then came the 21-hour work days – on major stories, we tend to work double days: the Australian day, followed, without rest, by the British day – the never-ending demands of our continuous-news channels, the usual pinched deadlines, and the familiar logistical challenges of severed roads, hotels without power, and in this instance a satellite that freakishly caught on fire in the middle of a live cross to the
Ten O'Clock News
, our flagship program.

In Rockhampton and Brisbane, we witnessed the slow inundation of properties and businesses, a ruination of homes and livelihoods that is always sad to witness. But it was the small towns of the Lockyer Valley, such as Grantham, that were clearly the epicentre of this disaster. When phrases came to be used such as ‘walls of water' and ‘inland tsunamis', I thought they had the ring of journalistic hyperbole. Then I flew into Grantham and saw the devastation myself.

Though on a smaller scale than the wreckage I had seen in Galle, Nagapattinam and Mullaitivu, the waters had nonetheless left behind a tsunami-like wake of destruction. Entire homes had been lifted from their foundations. Cars had been tossed miles further down the valley. This kind of destruction is always hard to look at, and the testimony of survivors and rescuers is even harder to listen to.

All of us retold the story of young Jordan Rice, the selfless 13-year-old who had the chance of being rescued from the floodwaters of Toowoomba but insisted that his 10-year-old brother, Blake, go first. Jordan could not swim, and the rope he was clinging to snapped.

Just as agonising was the testimony of Stacey Keep, a pregnant young mother whose house in Grantham was smashed in by the floodwaters, and who was swept a kilometre down the railway line that runs through the centre of the town, clutching her 23-month-old baby, Jessica. Her foot became trapped under one of the railway sleepers, and the force of the water swept Jessica from her arms. Like poor Sarita in Velankanni, who had lost two children this way in the tsunami, she simply did not have the strength to hang on. Always harrowing, these stories were even harder to bear as a new father.

Along with the instant reordering of priorities, parenthood had also made me much more risk averse. It was not as if we were in any great danger in the flood zone, but I was far more hesitant about wading through muddy waters that had venomous snakes zigzagging on the surface, and even felt slight foreboding when zipping over the tops of hill ranges in helicopters to reach the stranded communities – something I have done on countless occasions in far more hostile environments. We did what we had to do, and London was pleased with the coverage, but throughout the month-long crisis I just wanted to go home.

Christchurch was harder still, since major earthquakes are always more brutal to cover than floods or cyclones. Aside from the logistics and occasional aftershocks, the hardest tests were confronting death and ruin on such a large scale. Not since 9/11 had I witnessed such destruction in a First World city. Nor so much bereavement.

Cathedrals with wrecked facades and toppled steeples stood as landmarks to the destruction. So, too, did the parish churches, many of Victorian gothic splendour, with fallen roofs and wrecked naves. Some destroyed office blocks looked like concrete
houses of cards, while at others, like the CTV Building, which had once housed a community-television station, the devastation was almost complete. Had our pictures been broadcast in black and white, viewers could easily have mistaken them as wreckage from the Blitz.

Just as South Asia had experienced a year of disasters, the Antipodes were living through a summer of calamities. And, as with Queensland, I got out as quickly as London would let me. Here, I suspect another threshold had been crossed: the moment of return and reunion was a far more exhilarating prospect than the point of departure – another massive sea change from the early days of my career.

One of the more affecting sights in Christchurch had come at the airport, outside the perimeter of the downtown disaster cordon, where we had gone to film the arrival of a British urban search-and-rescue team. Greeting it at the gate was a welcome party that included the British High Commissioner, her press man, a couple of relief workers and local journalists. As we walked into the terminal to join them, I noticed off to the side a sad-faced Japanese man dressed in a slate-grey suit who had arrived from Tokyo and been greeted by no one. The bodies of more than a dozen Japanese students were buried still in the wreckage of the CTV Building – along with the television station, it also housed a foreign-language school – and he had come to retrieve the remains of his son or daughter, a horrendous journey that he had undertaken with enormous dignity and a minimum of fuss.

Even in the biggest disasters, often it is the small acts of humanity, courage and kindness that set me off, and this poor old man moved me to tears partly because he seemed so determined not to break down himself. The incongruity of the scene made
it all the more tragic: a Japanese man landing in a country he probably thought he would never set foot in, who by now had doubtless seen the pictures of the flattened CTV Building and knew his child could not have survived.

Hours earlier, we had filmed a Japanese search-and-rescue team sifting through the colourless rubble of the CTV Building in their bright-orange overalls. These teams remained in the city to help find and repatriate the dead students. Then, just two weeks later, they hurried back to their homeland, after a quake 8000 times as powerful as the seismic shock that devastated Christchurch struck off the north-east coast of Japan.