Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
MS LYSE
DOUCET AND
MR DAVID
MUNK
6 JUNE 2006
Q1 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you
for coming along. Unfortunately Leonard Doyle appears to have
forgotten that he is due to be here, so he may or may not arrive.
If he does, we will slide him in and draw him into the conversation.
Thank you to both of you for coming before us. This is the first
formal evidence session that this Committee has had on this inquiry
into humanitarian disasters. There was an informal briefing the
week before last, which I was not able to attend and which John
Battle chaired on my behalf, which gave us some useful background.
Obviously this immediate session is on the role of the media in
focusing attention and accountability in relation to humanitarian
disasters. From the perspective of where we are, a developed western
economy, it is interesting to determine what it is that makes
people respond to particular disasters. What is the issue? Clearly
the media has quite an important role to play. Is it perceived
national interest? Is it feel-good factors? Is it political issues?
What is it that makes a disaster one which people respond to,
given that there are many that go unnoticed? Perhaps the question
to both of you, first of all, is: When you are making these editorial
decisions, what are the factors that you think determine the kind
of coverage you give to humanitarian crises? What are the kinds
of crises that grab your attention? How do you make decisions
determining both whether you are going to cover them and the extent
to which you are going to cover them and how?
Mr Munk: I guess, to begin with,
as an editor sitting on a desk, your information is coming in,
whether it be from TV, radio or on the wires, and the first thing
you see of a disaster is the scale of it. You try to determine
the scale as quickly as you can. Once you determine the scale,
you also then figure out the location. The location is important
mainly because of the logistical problems which you will face
getting people on to the ground, whether the problems are the
physical problems of getting from A to B, or political problems:
visas, getting to countries which sometimes do not necessarily
want journalists in. I would say another factor would be the resources
you have, where they are, scattered around the world. When you
have looked at all those things, you also take a judgment on how
important you think this story is. There have been, I guess, five
or six pretty major disasters since 2000—I mean, natural
disasters—and with most of them—most of them—I
think we would react in a similar way. I think the process is
pretty similar for newsdesks and TV and most national newspapers
in this country: you have to start off just relying on what you
are hearing from the ground, and that may be a reporter on the
ground. I would say, in that order, it is scale, location, resources.
Those are the key factors.
Q2 Chairman: One thing you did not
mention was who is involved. The broadcast media is often the
first thing that people get, before the print media—not
necessarily, but often—and the initial report is: There
has been an earthquake—or an eruption or a tsunami, or whatever
it may be—how many Britons are involved? That is the impression
one gets. To what extent do you think that is a factor, as opposed
to: How many people? How bad?—in other words, a straight
humanitarian response.
Mr Munk: Without a doubt, it is
in your mind. I think most people would say that a ferry disaster
. . . Actually, I suppose that is more of an accident. A natural
disaster on the shores of France, where many Britons live, sometimes
is different from a natural disaster 10,000 miles away. That is
because, to some extent, we are all quite parochial, in the sense
that we know people who live there; we have family connections;
we are a society which is quite tightly knit. Newspapers do, without
a doubt, treat disasters in slightly different ways, but I think
you start off and you try to treat them in exactly the same way.
It is quite difficult to some extent. The tsunami was an interesting
case in point, because it was so widespread and so huge that the
question was not: How many Brits are involved in this? You are
having tens of thousands of people who are dying here across the
world, and it is from Sri Lanka to Somalia to Southern India,
the Andaman Islands, Thailand and Indonesia. There was quite a
concentration on Thailand at one point by a lot of the media and
we concentrated on it as well because thousands of Brits were
on holiday there. A lot of people here go on holiday to those
islands; we have a connection with it. In that sense, I think
it is a duty to look at that connection, but you do not look at
it exclusively and you have to keep it to some extent in balance.
That is what we do, I think—certainly on that occasion,
by the resources we allocated to those specific areas, those six
countries, how many reporters we sent out there, photographers,
how many times we went back to the place. I am not sure what you
think, Lyse.
Ms Doucet: First of all, I should
say it is very nice to be here. I recognise some of you—some
of you I have seen on the ground in disaster areas or in areas
of political conflict, so it is very nice to see you here, in
this setting. Let me take a step back before I answer that question,
to understand the context in which editorial decisions are being
made. As the United Nations put it, 2005 was the year of disasters.
More and more journalists, like myself, who often cover political
conflicts, political earthquakes, found themselves going to natural
earthquakes, to tsunamis, to floods. I think all of us had a very
acute understanding that our world was changing, whether it was
through climate change, whether it was through a greater sense
of our globalised world and how things which happen far away are
immediately on our doorstep. There was a sense in which this was
now on our agenda in a much bigger way than before. Now, 2006,
thank goodness, has not been as bad in terms of natural disasters,
although, last week, when the Indonesian earthquake happened,
again we were back at the decision: Do we cover this earthquake?
Must we be there? How should we be there? Of course the BBC is
a huge, vast organisation. I work for BBC World television; BBC
News 24 when there is a breaking story in the field; for BBC World
Service radio, which, as you know, is funded by grant in aid from
the Foreign Office; and then there is the massive side which is
the licence-fee funded part of the BBC. But when we go on big
stories, we all work together—separate budgets, of course,
but we all work together. So how does it work? Six o'clock in
the morning, seven o'clock in the morning—it depends what
time you start listening to the radio—the first reports
start coming in: There has been an earthquake: so much on the
Richter scale, so many people are dead. This happened 10 days
ago, on the Saturday. I thought, "Oh, my goodness, 300 dead.
Am I going to be sent?" I spent the next few hours wondering:
"Am I going to be sent to Indonesia?" What process did
my editors go through? First of all, they asked, "What is
going to be the impact of this earthquake in Indonesia?"
Of course we covered the tsunami in Indonesia, so we already had
experience of covering it: we know what the impact can be. In
some senses the BBC is in a different category, because of the
resources, because, with our global position, we basically cover
the world and we have offices all over the world, and we say,
"Do we have enough of our own journalists in Indonesia who
can cover the story? How quickly can they get up into Java? Do
we need to send from Singapore, where we have our regional bureau,
our South-East Asia bureau? Do we need to send from London? Do
we need to send a presenter?"—I would be one of the
people considered, along with other colleagues. "Do we need
to send some of our other reporters who are dispatched out to
these sorts of stories, who have the kind of experience? What
is the level? What are the resources we are going to put to it?
What is the magnitude of this story?" In the case of the
Indonesian earthquake, we had our Indonesian correspondent, we
had Andrew Harding who came from Singapore, and we had our local
reporters, and we felt that was enough and we covered the story.
It was a question also of how quickly could we get there. In October
last year, early in the morning, we heard the first reports of
an earthquake in Pakistan. The same questions asked by the editors,
calling each other as soon as it happens: "What is the magnitude
of this story? Does it matter?" And the question all of us
asked, were supposed to ask: "Why should anyone care? Why
should anyone care that something so terrible has happened in
Pakistan?" The Pakistan one was different. You asked the
question about are any Britons involved, and of course the Britain
of today is different from the Britain of 20 years ago. People
are very aware that Britons come from all walks of life and from
different parts of the world. There was an understanding that
a great percentage of the population are of South Asian origin
and they would be affected directly, and it was the case. By 10
o'clock in the morning we heard: "About 19 people are dead."
Nineteen. You would say, "Well, that's not a very big earthquake,"
but our editors said, "This has the possibility of being
something much bigger," and they took a risk. It is a risk,
because, when you deploy presenters and engineers and satellite
dishes and correspondents, it costs a lot of money and it means
money not spent on other things. We got on the plane—interestingly
enough, the plane we got on was the same plane as that of the
search and rescue team that was sent out, dispatched like this,
to be Britain's effort to try to help find people trapped under
the rubble; it was the same plane on which Oxfam and other agencies
had sent their media officers and more people to be on the ground—and
when we touched down in Islamabad the next morning it was 19,000
dead. And it kept going up and up and up to 70,000. In that one,
the BBC we can say was lucky or they planned well. We got our
dish on the ground in Islamabad, the first of the broadcasters;
we got our dish up to Muzaffarabad, the first of the broadcasters.
Those were the decisions we made then, but it is the same kind
of decision every time there is a natural disaster: What is the
level of deployment? How big is it? Does it matter? Does it matter
to the country? Does it matter to the region? Does it matter to
Britain? Does it matter to our understanding of the world? And
what are the knock-on costs, if we do not cover this one? If we
cover this one, what else can we not cover? All of us, be they
governments, be they aid agencies, be they journalists, have finite
resources. That is the kind of thinking that goes into our decision.
Q3 Chairman: One thing which occurs
to me on the basis of what you have said, which is very interesting,
is that there is a competition as well to be there first. Is there
not a danger that the media react like a shoal of fish, so they
will all go to this one. What about the idea that maybe this is
one that will not get covered and somebody should do it?
Ms Doucet: I think in those first
hours, when you are thinking of the story, perhaps someone might
say, "Oh, well, Sky will be there or ITN will be there or
CNN will be there," but I think, first of all, it is: "Is
this the story that we should cover?"—that this is
part of what the BBC is meant to do. In the same way that Members
of Parliament will be happy when policy goes right and you achieve
what you want, be it with your education policy or your immigration
policy or whatever, similarly, when journalists go out on an operation,
we like to get it right. We like to get as close as possible to
the truth, we like to cover the story with the resources that
are deserving of that story. On the Pakistan earthquake, in particular,
I think the BBC did a very good job, if I can say so. I think
we put in the right amount of resources. We were in—and
it is that classic phrase—the right place at the wrong time.
It was a terrible story, but to this day I would say it was a
privilege to be there to cover it and to tell the world about
it.
Q4 Mr Hunt: I wonder if I could ask
you both about some of the anomalies which seem to have occurred
in terms of the amount of coverage you have given to different
disasters. If you take, for example, two conflicts, the conflict
in Rwanda and the conflict in the Congo: the Rwandan conflict
has had huge publicity, it has had two films about it in the last
couple of years; the conflict in the Congo, which has seen many
more casualties and is still going on, seems to get much less
coverage. I just wonder: is it to do with the fact that one is
a kind of slow-burn conflict and one is something which had instant
impact? Is it to do with the fact, as one cameraman told me when
I was in the Congo, bluntly, that the public are bored of seeing
pictures of starving and dead Africans on their screens, and that
therefore you are looking for a new angle? I appreciate that both
the organisations you represent, BBC World and The Guardian,
are quite good at covering forgotten conflicts, but I wonder whether
you could address why it is that your immediate colleagues seem
to have such inexplicable priorities in terms of the conflicts
to which they choose to give huge coverage.
Mr Munk: To take your second example,
the Congo, we were talking about it just before we came in. We
were both saying that TIME magazine has the Congo on its
front cover this week and we were wondering: "Should we be
there?" We are there. We have been there for the last two
weeks looking at the Congo again. There is, to some extent, a
slightly artificial reason for being there—which we journalists
do create, what we call a `peg'—and the reason is the elections
which are in July. It gives a chance, I guess, to revisit a story
which, as you say, has been a slow-burn story. It is one of the
most atrocious losses of life—in fact it is the worst since
the Second World War, I believe—and in quite a short period
of time. I think the UN—was it Jan Egeland?—was saying
that it is a tsunami every month or every week.
Ms Doucet: Every few days.
Mr Munk: It is absolutely horrendous.
You ask yourself, "Why should this not be on the front page
of every newspaper in this country every single day?" because
it is that bad. I guess the answer to that is that you cannot
shout all the time. If you shout all the time people are not going
to listen to you. To some extent, you have to measure the way
you approach a story. I think your readers will respond to it
much better in that way. I am not being crass by saying that they
cannot understand or cannot take on board the complexities or
the scale of it. It is that, in the end, we are a newspaper and
we have to have a variety of things going into our pages. I mean,
the Congo is so horrendous that you could say we should do a Congo
year—almost to batter people over the head, and say, "Look,
this is just so important"—but I do not think shouting
is the way to do it. We have gone back to it on numerous occasions,
through this year, last year, and we intend to do it until there
is a resolution, if there is a resolution in the near future.
I do not think it is a particularly easy question for journalists
to answer, because sometimes the answer you give is not particularly
palatable, I guess.
Ms Doucet: What is interesting
too is, ironically, the fact that they are forgotten is the story
now. The front cover of TIME magazine says "Congo—the
forgotten crisis." If you read some of the international
media, they are saying: Why have we forgotten Darfur? Suddenly,
in a sort of obverse kind of way, the fact that nobody is paying
attention, suddenly, everyone is saying, "Why aren't you
paying attention." You are getting a spate of articles in
which there is virtue in saying, "Nobody is looking at it,
so I'm going to look at it." We talked about it. When I first
met David, I said, "What is the answer?" We all wrestle
with this. Again, back to the logistics, it is much easier to
cover an event, something which happens, partly because it grabs
the world's attention. It is the concern that day, whether it
is world leaders, policy makers, the UN, the aid agencies. As
journalists, you focus on that point. It is not to say that the
other one is not more important but it has just been there a long
time. It is an emergency situation, let us say—a `complex'
emergency, is the word used—and it may even be a worsening
emergency, but the logistics of it are more difficult—the
`peg', as David says—and, if it has always been that way,
when do you then go in? The BBC now has these things where they
have a week of attention to something or a day of attention, where
they will concentrate resources on one area and not another, to
try to bring attention to ones which have not been covered before.
But I should say that the research in the BBC, whether it is for
domestic outlets or for the international outlets, is that our
audiences want to hear more about stories of what happened in
a disaster: "You covered a lot last year on the Pakistan
earthquake or the tsunami. What has happened since then?"
in terms of staying with stories. Staying with stories is the
other thing we hear a lot in the BBC: "Don't let the story
go away" and so we have this thing now where we go back.
With the tsunami we went back a month after, 100 days after, six
months after and a year after, going back and checking on it,
because people want to know what has happened since then. Congo
is the best example. The Jan Egeland thing is interesting too,
because it goes to that other question which I think is something
you are going to be addressing today: What is the relationship
between the media and aid agencies? Someone like Jan Egeland has
found a very creative and truthful and powerful way of representing
these disasters, in a way in which, when journalists hear the
words, they do not think, "Oh, this is propaganda. Oh, we
have heard this before." He finds a way to phrase it such
that it catches your attention. It is not to say he is using cliches.
I remember standing on a beach in Tamil Nadu, covering the aftermath
of the tsunami, and listening to Jan Egeland down the satellite
line to New York talking about the unprecedented response to an
unprecedented disaster, which was the tsunami, but then he said,
"What about all the other forgotten crises?" I was sitting
there, thinking, "What about the Congo? What about Afghanistan?
The resources for one thing mean less resources for another."
Aid agencies too can find creative ways to keep it on our agenda
as well.
Q5 John Bercow: Like Jeremy Hunt,
I am interested in the question of why you choose to focus on
one natural disaster—as opposed to a conflict situation,
perhaps—rather than another. I wonder if I can probe you
as to whether the type of government in a country, and, as a consequence
of that type of government, the sort of culture that is created,
can influence your thinking. The example I have in mind which
is relatively recent, perhaps 18 months or two years or so ago,
is the disaster that occurred in North Korea. I think it was a
train disaster, if I remember rightly. I was struck at the time
that, although the Secretary of State did issue a statement and
there was talk of providing help, the North Koreans did not seem
to want any help and almost regarded it as an insult to be offered
it. I just wonder, given what we all know, that North Korea—perhaps
like Burma, but even more so—is a massively closed society,
does that have an impact?
Ms Doucet: Have you ever tried
to get a visa to go to North Korea as a journalist? Stories. Faces.
Images. Sound. If you cannot put a human face on a tragedy, nobody—none
of us in this room—is going to plough through statistics
and press releases. If the journalist cannot get there and tell
the story, the story is not going to get told. That is the problem.
I think journalists would love to go to North Korea to tell the
story. If you want to talk about forgotten, that one is buried.
At least we can get into Congo—with great difficulty, but
at least we can get there. Burma. Zimbabwe. More journalists are
pretending to be going on safaris than any other occupation for
the journalists, because they simply cannot get in. When you started
raising this, I was thinking that I was reading some of the studies
that have been done on the difference in media reaction and they
were talking about what had happened in Orissa in 1999 and what
had happened in Mozambique in 2000. In Orissa, in a cyclone, 10,000
people died and 12.6 million were affected. In Mozambique, 800
died, 1.5 million were temporarily displaced. Mozambique received
seven times more aid and five times more coverage. Why? Because
the Indians would not let the journalists go to see the impact
of what had happened in Orissa, whereas, in Mozambique, we have
all seen the pictures of the helicopters going out. To this day,
the story of the woman giving birth to a child in a tree in Mozambique
is mentioned. Everybody remembers that story. If we could get
to North Korea, if we could tell the stories, I am sure we would
get—
Q6 Hugh Bayley: But, with the greatest
of respect, that was not the story. I mean, why in Mozambique
was the story helicopters, when boats were doing the saving of
the people on the ground?
Ms Doucet: We did boats too. I
saw pictures of my colleagues in boats.
Q7 Hugh Bayley: But, with great respect,
one woman having birthed in a tree is not the disaster story,
it is not the development story. It is a public consumption story,
it is a tabloid story. It is a very, very strong story, but are
you there just to provide stories, just to provide entertainment
and fix audiences around the world, or are you there for something
deeper?
Ms Doucet: Is it entertainment?
Why do we care about humanitarian disasters? We do not care about
them because 10,000 have died or 10 million are displaced, we
care about them because individuals, like our brothers and sisters
and children, are affected. If it is not a human tragedy—
Q8 Hugh Bayley: What has happened
to the mission to explain?
Ms Doucet: It is explaining. But
how do you explain? How do you get someone in Clapham or someone
down in Kent to care about this story?
Q9 John Bercow: Are high-tech gizmos,
helicopters, satellite predictions of weather patterns the answer,
or are there longer term disaster prevention solutions—
Ms Doucet: But we are talking
about different things. You need to get somewhere, and, unfortunately,
sometimes you need helicopters, sometimes you need a boat, sometimes
you need a very good pair of walking boots. You have got to get
there. I mean, that is not the story. We do not want to have exclusive
focus. Some papers may go in and just do the story of the woman
in the tree—here we are, again, using the woman in the tree—but
I think there is a broader mission to explain. I agree with you
absolutely: Why did this happen? Was the relief effort the way
it should be? Did we respond at the right time and with the right
aid? I completely agree with you, but it is also about telling
a story.
Q10 John Battle: Jan Egeland himself
has stressed for a long time that there is not a clear pattern
of which disasters or emergencies or humanitarian crises get coverage.
It is very, very uneven. He stressed all the time that if we go
on the tsunami, in particular, and even the Pakistan-India earthquake,
they distort what is actually going on in the world massively.
We had a private session where Paul Harvey from the Humanitarian
Policy Group of the ODI gave us evidence. He gave us this sheet,
and there were on that sheet 37 other disasters, and they are
not all in places where journalists cannot go. Surprisingly, a
lot are in Central and Latin America and a lot are in Central
Europe, where you can get to now. I welcome the refocusing on
Africa, because Africa was the forgotten continent for a long
time. I was incredibly impressed by the number of people who turned
up to Oxfam shops that Christmas. Because the coverage was so
massive, it touched the people to go and respond. Marsha and I,
from our neck of the woods in Yorkshire, would say in relation
to the response at the early times, in the early hours and days—and
I have to say that one of my neighbours was stood next to me when
he got a phone call from a man under the rubble in Pakistan, and
that woke me up to the earthquake big time—that there was
a delayed reaction and there was not the response of the people.
What about all those other disasters, the other 37? Do you think
the media have a humanitarian responsibility to give publicity
to those emergencies? Is there a value in the media being there
first in order to waken up the rest of the media? I am not necessarily
saying newspapers but television as well. How do we handle that,
to waken the world up? My second question would be: Could you
make some comment on how you see your role in wakening up the
readers, the listeners, the viewers and the audience to respond
appropriately? I think that follows on from Hugh really. Is it
just to say that there is nothing we can do about it and these
are terrible circumstances, or do you see yourselves as having
a role to steer people? Sometimes there are inappropriate responses,
such as people rushing in with blankets and equipment that is
not needed, in some cases to the wrong places, when the best message
is to send money to DEC or the local Oxfam collection point. What
is your view of that nexus of problems?
Mr Munk: You talk about the 37
other disasters. I would go back to what I said earlier about
measuring your coverage. I think it would be irresponsible if
you did not cover some of those 37 disasters, and you have to
make a judgment on which ones you do. However, I think it would
be irresponsible as well if you covered all of them to some extent,
because effectively your paper or your magazine would be absolutely
full of disaster. No one is going to pay attention if day after
day you have disaster in your pages. I mean, you read newspapers,
most people probably read newspapers—or maybe on the web
now as well—and, if it was unremitting disaster in a newspaper,
you would eventually not buy it. You would buy something else
which gave you a slightly more rounded view of the world—because
the world is not full of disasters. There are disasters out there,
but that is not the only thing going on and we have to reflect
that.
Q11 John Battle: Do you subscribe
to the compassion fatigue thesis: that, if we tell too many people
too much about what is going on, nobody will give anything because
they will all be burnt out by worrying about it? I think that
expression was a media construct. I have never heard a constituent
come up to me and say, "I'm suffering from compassion fatigue"
but I have read in the newspapers quite a lot that they might
be.
Mr Munk: I do not know who first
used that phrase. I think it was probably quite a clever phrase
to use. I think there are people who would say that, given too
much of a bad thing, they do not want it any more. They will hold
their hands up and go, "I know it is a terrible situation,
but save me." As editors we have to find different ways of
telling what sometimes is the same story. I think the recent earthquake
in Java was such an incident. There, 5,200 people died. On our
new scale of things—because things have got bigger, or they
seem to have got bigger: 232,000 people dying in a tsunami, which
was so wide across the world, and now we have 5,000—where
does that lie? In the case of Java I think it was a slightly different
story because you had a lot of aid agencies and a lot of relief
operations already there because of the imminent or otherwise
eruption of the volcano. I guess that sort of tightened the story;
it was not as long. We were not there as long as we normally would
be on a disaster like that, because people were being helped,
things were obviously happening there. After three or four days
you thought to yourself, "We are telling the same story again
and we are trying to find ways of telling the same story—which
is that there are a lot of people out there who have lost loved
ones. There are still people who need some help, but, in general,
given what has happened, things are looking okay." Is it
because the media only feeds on things when things are bad? No,
I do not think so. I think it is because the media go there, to
begin with, and sometimes—like in the tsunami, or you mentioned
North Korea earlier on—is unable to get to places. One place
which was not covered in the tsunami was Burma. We sent somebody
up the coast, sneaked in there, because we were hearing stories
that lots of people had died. It was not the case, so we came
back and we reported elsewhere. But, I think, generally, as an
editor, it is difficult but you just have to keep on finding different
ways to tell the same story. Once you find that things are okay
or you perceive them to be okay, you move on.
Q12 Richard Burden: Could I return,
Lyse, to something you said a bit earlier on about decisions around
days of attention or weeks of attention. I completely understand
about the need to respond to events and that to some extent dictates
the agenda. I also understand, if you like, the Burma/North Korea
issue of not being able to get to places and that limits you.
You described in some detail that you get a phone call at six
or seven in the morning about the earthquake and the process that
is then gone through in terms of determining the BBC's response
to that. What would be the equivalent sequence around decisions
on: Are we going to do a week of attention, a day of attention,
on something that has not had a profile? How are those decisions
made?
Ms Doucet: It is a variety. There
is no one reason which goes behind it. Sometimes it is because
a particular journalist will say—which I have started to
say to my bosses—"We should go to Congo. We really
have not done enough in Congo, so we should." Sometimes it
is a question of where, in terms of world television, because
we have a big audience there. So we want to go and do a lot more
coverage, look at stories which are not in the news all the time,
do culture, do entertainment—do something different, if
you like. Sometimes it is just a question of doing something different.
We did an Afghanistan day because we wanted to give people a sense
of what happens outside the capital. We asked the question: "What
is life like if you are in Afghanistan today?" We did the
same thing in Iraq: "What is life like? It is not just suicide
bombings every day in the capital; there is another story that
isn't being told." It is usually to say, "Let's complement,
let's broaden our coverage. Let's give people something they have
not heard before." That is something we also ask of ourselves,
aside from: "Why should anybody care?" It is to tell
people something they have not heard before, something which surprises
them, something which makes them think either, "Oh, my God,"
or "Well, that's interesting." It is a variety of different
calculations, if you like.
Mr Munk: You are also relying
on what people are telling you.
Ms Doucet: Yes.
Mr Munk: Absolutely on the ground.
The Guardian has three correspondents in Africa. Obviously
it is a massive continent and you cannot cover the whole continent
with three people. We rely on agencies, on stringers, on various
contacts which we have within countries to tell us, whether it
be through the wire feed, which is basically the thing we read
every day, or . . . Just to give you again scales, the volume
that we get through, just on the AP, the Associated Press wire,
you will get about 600 stories coming through on your desk a day,
on the Reuters wire you will get about 350. Some of those are
repeats. On top of that, you have radio, TV, the internet now—which
is far more a source of news for us and others: you have all the
other papers around the world which you can access by the internet
and find out what is going on in different countries. The Washington
Post may be in Congo or they may be in Nigeria for a certain
reason. You will read their story and think, "Have they got
a point there? Should we be going there?" As well as that,
you are all relying on agencies. Oxfam is an agency we work quite
closely with at times. Save the Children. Action Aid. They have
more resources than we do and they have more people on the ground
than we do on an international level. So you have to rely on what
people are telling you and you have to have your ears always open.
A temptation is sometimes to close them because there is so much
coming in, but, as long as you are able to keep your ears open,
you will be all right—hopefully.
Q13 Hugh Bayley: The Chairman started
off by asking you why you cover what you cover. I do not think
you answered the question. You talked about how you choose what
it is you cover in terms of news value, immediacy, and relevance
to the audience that you are speaking to, but not why. I would
like you both to say a little bit more. Is it to save lives? Is
it to change public policy? Is it to shock or to surprise or to
entertain the audience? Or is it just to attract readers and viewers?
Ms Doucet: I am really glad you
asked that question because this has now become a subject of discussion
for journalists, where they say, "Should there be good news
journalists? Should journalists be messengers of good? Should
journalists have another responsibility than that which is trying
to tell the story?" I cannot speak for all my colleagues,
but I have noticed a certain resistance in Britain to any sense
that journalists have this other role, that they should be somehow
like an aid agency or like a vicar or like a government official.
I think it is very important that we remember we have our job
to do, government has its job to do and aid agencies have their
job to do. When John says, "What is your role in waking up
the readers?" it is that sometimes The Guardian will
say, "Look at this. Look what is happening," but for
something like the BBC, which I would regard as a media of record,
it is not our job to say things are really terrible. It is the
aid agencies' job, who are working there on the ground, day in
and day out, to try to tell us what is happening there, and for
the government also to say, "This is our response, this is
our policy, this is our aid programme," et cetera.
I think we have to be very clear about what our mandate is but
we also should be clear that we have to break down who are the
journalists. You do not need telling from me that the business
of some newspapers is to sell newspapers. They are going to have
a different look at the news from us at the BBC, who have a different
approach to how we cover news and how we cover stories. We can
do weeks and "Let's bring attention to Africa" and that
is because we have a different funding structure and a different
sense of what our relationship with our audience is. I think it
is very important not just to say "the media" but to
break down what kind of media we are talking about—radio,
television, tabloids, internet, whatever. I would hope the BBC's
job is never to shock but, sometimes, when journalists are on
the ground and it is so terrible and nobody is paying attention,
they might say, "Don't you understand how bad this is? Please,
sit up in your living rooms and take notice."
Mr Munk: You asked: "Is it
our job to shock?" No, but you will shock people because
what you are reporting is shocking. Is it your job to save lives?
I do not think your job is to save lives. It may be a consequence
of what you report. As for changing public policy, this question
could apply for international as well as domestic journalism,
anyway, but you cannot go in with an agenda. If you go in with
an agenda, you are not going to get a story. You will be turfed
out in some places, for certain. You will not be trusted. People
will always see you as: "The Guardian has turned up.
They want to increase DFID's budget by £40 million next year
and this is why they are here." People look at you differently
if you go in with an agenda. You just tell the story straight.
If you tell the story straight, you let other people make up their
minds. That is really the only thing you should be doing.
Q14 Hugh Bayley: If you think back
to the 1983 Ethiopian famine, the public generally thinks it was
about a food crisis, a harvest which did not come, when in actual
fact we know it was a genocidal government which did not move
food around in the country. It seems to me you cannot avoid public
policy. Perhaps I am saying that you are news reporters, your
job is to tell people what is happening, but there are other journalists
whose job it is to write features, to analyse, and there is also
a news job to follow through. How would you move the story from
information to analysis and from analysis to a reporting of outcomes?
Mr Munk: In many ways they are
seamless, in the sense that from news you can get analysis. Once
you know what is going on on the ground, you can analyse the facts
as you see them. However, you should try to split them up. You
tell the story in facts, as the way they are and the way they
are seen by the reporters on the ground. If you want to comment
on those facts, if you want to make decisions of people on those
facts, you separate it. It is what the BBC does and it is what
The Guardian does in terms of: "Facts are sacred;
comment is free". What was your last category?
Q15 Hugh Bayley: Through to an assessment
of outcomes. I suppose, at the crudest level, the tsunami is still
a story three months, six months, nine months later.
Mr Munk: It is. As Lyse was saying,
the BBC has been back to various places, whether it be Sri Lanka
or Southern India, the Andaman Islands, Thailand or Indonesia.
Likewise, we adopted a village in Indonesia and we saw their lives
develop over a year. I think that is a valuable thing because
it is a slightly different way of reporting the story and it engages
people still in the story.
Hugh Bayley: I think it is very valuable.
Mr Munk: Likewise, with the money
aspect of things, when your government is spending lots of money
in a certain area, perhaps you want to know where your money is
going, and that is one way of doing it.
Q16 John Bercow: I wonder if I can
ask you about the current balance that does or does not exist
in disaster reporting. Specifically, I am quite interested in
the balance and the distinction between analysis of the immediate
circumstances, that is to say, the prevailing human context, on
the one hand, and analysis of the political dimensions on the
other—possibly political problems which might have even,
if not caused, certainly exacerbated the crisis, or political
problems which, over a period—again thinking to the medium
and long-term—could slow up the process of recovery. I ask
this question in no pejorative sense, I am simply making the point—which
is probably tedious from your point of view, but I think it is
valid—that it is in the nature of your work that you have
a very short attention span; in other words, you are focused on
the here and now and it is your responsibility to be. I thought
it was rather interesting, Mr Munk, that a moment ago you resisted
what might have been a temptation, if not for you then for other
journalists, to say, "Oh, yes, saving lives is very important,
very important." I was rather pleased that you did not tick
that box but said, "Well, no, that may very well be a beneficial
consequence, but it is not our job." So, let us face it,
you do not see it as your role to save the world. One of the problems—and,
as I say, this underlies my question—is that you are interested
now, but medium term—six months—or long-term—a
year, two years, five years—are you? Probably not. Therefore,
what are the effects of that on the reporting?
Ms Doucet: I mentioned earlier
this whole thing about "staying with the story". This
has become one of our phrases that we use in the BBC, partly because,
as I mentioned, our audiences do want to know what happened in
a certain place, but also, when you ask this question about our
short attention span, it is very interesting. In countries I go
to on a regular basis, like Afghanistan, I often think: "What
is the attention span?"—but not as a journalist. The
question you ask, especially when it comes to humanitarian disasters
or complex emergencies, is the same question we can ask of you
as MPs. In Afghanistan they will say, "Why do the journalists
not pay enough attention? Why does the British Government only
give one year of funding, or year on year funding? We need long-term
attention, from journalists, from the military, from the aid agencies
and from government aid programmes." We are all facing the
same problem. When John says there are 37 emergencies you are
not covering, there are probably 37 emergencies the British Government
is not funding and the aid agencies. How I wish it were different—I
really do—that we could cover them all, but all of us are
confronting the same problem. I do not think it is something particularly
with journalists. It is true that the media with more limited
resources will send out one reporter—possibly a reporter
who has never been to that country; let us say to Pakistan or
Indonesia—they will do a series of features, and then they
will not go again and the story will disappear from the newspaper.
In our case, after our team which was sent out to report on the
Pakistan earthquake went away, we had our office in Pakistan to
do it. They had Declan Walsh there to do it. People who have the
resources, have bureaus on the ground, will continue the story,
and that is how the attention span continues. But I agree with
you that the problems will continue to manifest themselves and
we will not be able to give it the same kind of attention. But
then, of course, the attention span of audiences goes away too.
There will be another earthquake; there will be something else
as well.
Mr Munk: On the political dimension,
the tsunami was pretty unique, I guess—well, it was unique,
anyway, but in the sense that it managed to hit some of the most
politically fraught places in the world, whether it be Banda Aceh
or Sri Lanka. Likewise, with the Pakistan earthquake. Kashmir,
with the problems there. Iran, the Bam Earthquake back in 2003
was particularly difficult, because having a reporter in Iran
is a luxury, and then getting a reporter back into Iran to do
a follow-up six months later is an even greater luxury. We are
lucky, in that we have effectively a staff reporter there now.
Q17 Ann McKechin: You have both mentioned
the sheer size of the multiple range of media that covers these
sorts of stories and it is a very competitive market. When you
are covering humanitarian emergencies, do media representatives
operate on a "do no harm" basis; that is, not using
helicopters and aircraft which emergency services who have to
go out at the same time to assess the story may be able to use?
Or recruiting staff where they may have better uses for humanitarian
purposes? I am not criticising your own agencies, which clearly
have very good standards, but I think just in the age of more
multiple media, with more and more people trying to cover the
same story, is there not a risk that they are going to take over
valuable resources?
Mr Munk: I would say TV probably
takes more resources. The press, more and more now, is effectively
one person, with a camera around his or her neck, whereas, with
the problems of getting television coverage of certain disasters,
you need a minimum of four, I guess. Is it a team of four people
just going to a place?
Ms Doucet: You could send one,
with a camera. I have been in situations like that, where you
are with an aid agency and the helicopter is full—or the
plane is full of sacks of flour, sacks of wheat, is there room
for a journalist?—and you make decisions. Aid agencies make
decisions. Aid agencies also have to raise money. Let us be clear
about this too. They have to make a calculation. It is a terrible
thing to do, but unfortunately that is reality. If I put a cameraman—let
us say a pool cameraman, who will go for ITN, BBC and Sky—on
this plane instead of five sacks of wheat, there will be greater
attention in Britain, we will get the story, and maybe that will
be better, because in the end we will get more money and that
will be better for the victims. Sometimes they say, "No,
no. No journalists now. The most important thing is to get the
food out there immediately." Those decisions are made. Sometimes
they are split-second decisions. I have also seen situations where
the helicopter is cleared of everything and all the journalists
pile into it, and also when journalists have pooled their money
and paid for the helicopter themselves. Of course, for us, that
is then a question of our resources . . . There is no one answer
to it. It is a question of: Do you put your money for aid agencies
or do you put your money into a press release or into a sack of
flour? The aid agency business is changing too. The aid business
is now much more sophisticated. They are much more savvy about
the media. It is interesting, reading a lot of the studies about
the relationship between the media and aid agencies, that they
still all point out that we do not really understand each other
very well and that we do have to do more to understand each other
better. But I know, whatever disaster I go to now, if I interview
somebody from an agency, they have the t-shirt on with something
across the t-shirt, they have the hat on, the button on, and hopefully
they have something behind them with their label on it. Sometimes
I look at that, but then I think, "That's part of what they
do. Maybe the Disasters Emergency Committee has to be organised
differently so that they do not have to raise money every time
there is a disaster." It is complex but your question is
a very good one.
Ann McKechin: It is a different response
from the one you would expect if a disaster occurred here in the
United Kingdom, where the media would be put in a certain place
but not a place which would interfere directly with humanitarian
or rescue efforts. I think there is concern that we have a lot
of agencies coming in from abroad, seeking funds from their partners
and their home countries; that, yes, there is a competition to
get a story across, which would not occur in the same way if it
was happening here in the West—although, perhaps Hurricane
Katrina last year may have proved the opposite of that scenario,
where there were obviously a lot of media pouring into the area.
Chairman: That may be a question we can
ask the NGOs as well.
Q18 John Barrett: You mentioned earlier
on logistical problems and editorial decisions. Is it also down
to getting the image with the impact, or the story will not be
read in the paper and will not be seen on the television? You
have mentioned agencies. They also want to see the image with
the impact. Is that where it all joins together, the demand of
the image—getting it on to the news, getting it on to the
television? Is it all about image? The danger of that is that
the image with the impact can be something quite different from
what is the most important thing.
Mr Munk: Images are important,
sure, but they are not the be-all and end-all, especially for
a newspaper. You only have to listen to a radio broadcast as well:
you create images in your mind, and you have an extraordinary
powerful dispatch from somebody around the world.
Q19 John Barrett: Will the strong
photograph that goes with it drive it on to the front page or
drive it on to the television screen when there are other more
complicated or detailed issues that could have taken more text
or taken more analysis.
Mr Munk: I think we are sufficiently
flexible in order to cope with a lack of an image on our front
page. We have ways of doing things slightly differently. You do
not need to have a stunning photograph in order to splash a story
of certain importance. Again it is an editorial judgment. If it
is an important enough story, it will make the front page and
it will make inside spreads or whatever it may be. If there was
not a single photograph or a single image coming out of Pakistan
or of the tsunami for two days, it would still have made the amount
of space in our paper.
Ms Doucet: This is such an interesting
field. If we look at British media, we have all seen and been
touched by the story of one child, the one child in Iraq with
all their limbs torn off. Cynics would say "the poster-boy
of Iraq" became the story which galvanised people in Britain
to pay money. Get this boy into a hospital. Get him some new limbs.
It touches the whole country. Sometimes journalists go and look
for that story, that one Ali or Mohammed, or Ayesha or Jane or
whatever, to put a face on it. Sometimes, getting into all the
complexities and things just does not work. People do not sit
up and say, "Oh, my God, look at that little boy or look
at that little girl." Either you can say that distorts it,
because we are not getting into the complexities of it, we are
not telling the whole story, and because that one little boy is
going to get all the attention, the sympathy or the money, and
the others are not going to get it—and that is what was
said about Ali in Iraq—or do we say, "Great. One boy
was helped. At least one boy was helped, and maybe other boys
and girls will be helped as well." But this is sometimes
the image people look for. Some journalists do it cynically—you
know, neither of us are going to sit here and defend all journalists—but
some journalists do it because of: "How am I going to make
people sit up and care about this story?" I covered Tamil
Nadu. What do I remember? I remember the story of the woman who
held on to her two children and then had to decide which one she
let go. That is what I remember about Tamil Nadu. Hugh and I had
this little thing about the story. Some things stick in your mind
because they are human dramas. At the end of the day, journalists,
as terrible as we are, we are human beings too. We want to know
the human cost to this as well—in individual terms, sometimes.
Mr Davies: Is it not the fact, Chairman,
that there has been in this morning's discussion a quite large
element of humbug, self-deception and simply blarney. Nobody wants
to mention the fundamental reality—and no doubt it is extremely
tasteless and tactless of me to do so—and that is that you
guys are in the competitive circulation business. I do not doubt
for a moment your objective sincerity and that you are pleased
to be doing your profession because you believe you are already
doing good in the world as a result. I am sure you are doing good
in the world as a result, because you are actually being employed
by people who intend that you should improve your circulation
at the expense of competitors. To take readers away from The
Times or The Independent, to take viewers away from
Sky or CNN: that is your professional skill and that is why you
are being paid and that is what you are expected to deliver. You
therefore have to be an expert in human psychology—and no
doubt you are—and you know that people will pay for dispassionate
information only, generally, where that helps them plan their
own lives. You can have in your newspaper good advice about people's
pensions or surveys of local schools and hospitals, and people
will be happy to pay for that, but, when you are going further
afield, you have to use other methods, and they are all classic
things. The human race will pay to be titillated—we all
know that—the human race will pay to be shocked—that
is why people pay to go to disaster movies. The human race will
pay for sentimentality and to be tear-jerked—that has been
the major raw material of the Hollywood industry for the last
100 years, we all know that. And so you guys are actually looking
for the story of the poor child having lost its limbs or anything
to do with children or animals.
Chairman: I think you are saying it is
all about money, are you?
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