Curse of the BBC closures
IN EVELYN Waugh’s famous novel Scoop there is a story about a distinguished foreign correspondent who sets off on the Orient Express to cover a civil war in a Balkan state but gets off at the wrong capital.
He files wholly fictitious accounts of the carnage, which, backed by his great authority, lead to a run on the unfortunate country’s currency, the collapse of the government and, indeed, a civil war.
The magic touch that only a genius like Evelyn Waugh can apply is that the correspondent is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his reporting of the war, once it gets going.
Now the BBC, in its clumsier manner, looks about to start a Balkan war itself. The World Service is to close its Romanian service, one of the few remaining in Europe since the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which of course funds it, decided that the Voice of Britain is no longer needed in the former Soviet satellite states.
The priority now is to beam British propaganda to the middle east via costly World Service TV channels in Arabic and Farsi; whether or not the journalists view their work as propaganda is not the point, since the Arabs and Iranians certainly will, if they view it at all.
To this end 12 language services have so far been axed and others are being offshored to much cheaper production in the countries concerned.
Two years ago the BBC closed the Hungarian service. Within days the government was in crisis and mobs roamed the streets.
At the same time the BBC closed the Thai service, and the same thing happened there, only worse. Within two weeks the government had fallen.
If I were a distinguished foreign correspondent I would be leaping onto a budget airline flight to Bucharest.
If Evelyn Waugh was still around he would have the correspondent board the wrong plane at Stansted and start a war in Estonia or somewhere, but sadly he isn’t.
‘What do you think of our new clothes?’
THE MUMBO JUMBO men have been round at EMAP magazines, where an employee staff survey is under way of startling inanity.
Staff are being required to complete an “ABCDEmap Values Questionnaire”, which asks what they think about “the values and how good or bad we are living them now”.
These “values … should be a tool of self appraisal that we all use to turn this business from great to brilliant. The aim of the questionnaire is to set out what each of the values, ACCOUNTABLE ... BRAVE ... COLLABORATIVE ... DECENT ... ESSENTIAL ... mean — i.e. what does good look like.
“We recognise that these values are aspirational and underpin our vision, so we want to know how good (or bad) we are at living these now.”
Staff have to say what their “market” is and then apply marks from 1 to 10 to a range of propositions. These include:
We recognise “idea” for how precious it is
We look for opportunity beyond the incremental
We are generators of unique product
We run winners
and my favourite:
We make one and one make three
Evelyn Waugh couldn’t have made it up.
Freedom of information fighters
WE ALL admire Heather Brooke, the American freelance who came to London with her “First Amendment” notions at around the time the UK’s Freedom of Information Act was coming into force.
She set about exhorting reporters to use the Act and set an example herself by opening up the sleazy world of MPs’ allowances to unprecedented scrutiny.
She led a reporting revolution, with local papers particularly pursuing shoals of FoI applications — if only because overworked reporters can rake in the stories without too much effort.
Heather Brooke is also an active NUJ member, but she is nothing to an Indian freelance called Bhaskar. India has a Right to Information Act (RTI) and Bhaskar has made so many requests that the city government in Bangalore has given him his own office in their building.
“Since 2002 I have made 1,200 RTI applications,” he says. “The governor has directed the corporation commissioners to reply to the questions I’ve raised, so they had to create a separate room for me.”
So just who is snapping who?
I DO HOPE the NUJ’s photographic militant tendency know what they’re doing with their complaints about being photographed by the Metropolitan Police.
They accuse the Met’s Forward Intelligence Team of persistently snapping them and storing the images on a database. It amounts, they say, to harassment.
Police admit that photographers get snapped at what they call public order events; everyone does. And of course they recognise the journalists who regularly cover such events because they see them so often. But they strongly deny that they keep the images on a database.
Harassment by photographers is not a new charge. It comes up a lot from celebrities, royalty and others who don’t like having packs of snappers poking their lenses at them all the time.
It’s probable that the photographers who hound celebrities are not the ones who cover demos. But not everyone will appreciate that, and I can see a risk that the spectacle of press photographers whining about having their pictures taken will hold them and the union up to a certain amount of ridicule.