Most television journalists, if they came to it via newspapers, retain a soft spot for print. It’s a purer medium, in that no part of the story is harder to tell than another. With telly, if the pictures aren’t there to illustrate a point, then it is either not made, or arrived at by a device that requires no image other than that of the reporter.
Technical stuff: but the effect might be to blind television journalists to what they see when the camera isn’t rolling. If no image is recorded of something, well, it ‘‘didn’t happen’’.
Such abstractions came to me on election night. I was at Jeremy Corbyn’s count in Islington. Surprise and joy for Corbynistas, most of it recorded for posterity. But one moment wasn’t, and I retain the imprint of it more clearly than scenes far more – dread word – iconic.
It was about 3.30 in the morning. I had satisfied my boss by lobbing a question at a beaming Jezza. The sports hall where the count happened was closing down, furlongs of broadcast cable were being wound up, satellite trucks disappearing into the just-lightening night sky. I had left too, awaiting my producer and a lift to the hotel. I stood, tired, mute, propping myself up against an outer wall in the darkness.
Then I caught sight of Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s arch-strategist, walking towards me, lost in thought. There was nobody else around and Milne hadn’t seen me accidentally lurking in the shadows. He didn’t say anything. There was no spontaneous fist-pump. But the look: an arching smile of triumph and vindication set in a face – ordinarily – of the most studied inscrutability. A mien practised in dissembling, finally enjoying one giant psychic exhalation. It was a moment so unguarded I almost felt the need to look away.
A moment that can be hinted at in print, but impossible to convey electronically.
……..
One of my growing number of Twitter trolls described me recently as “Sky News’s Angel of Death”, an unflattering reference to my anchoring of recent terror attacks in Manchester and London Bridge and by no means the cruellest.
My critics seem to feel that if someone is on the telly, then they have consented to act as a punchbag, or a lightning rod for a rising fury that finds no outlet elsewhere. It appears to be worsening as the middle ground vanishes.
Increasingly, it seems to me, an Islamist terror attack now produces a binary Brexit-style public response. You are either part of the “perversion of a great religion of peace/it’s our fault because of foreign policy and intelligence failings” group; or you subscribe to the view that treason should be revived as a hanging offence and all mosque-building suspended. Viewers who don’t feel their prejudices are being reflected on-screen express themselves graphically online.
Reassuringly, I get it in neck from both sides. But it’s not easy. Other media outlets are watching ravenously. An on-air “spat” I had with former security minister Lord West in Manchester made it into the Daily Express.
Harder still is the knowledge that you are being watched by relatives of the dead and dying. It’s not good enough simply to parrot the facts. Nor do people want mawkishness. It’s important to feel the sense of loss without exploiting it. Increasingly, empathy and sympathy are interchangeable synonyms, but the difference between putting yourself in the shoes of others and merely observing remains important.
……..
Amid the hubbub, surely it becomes even more incumbent upon us to find that still voice of calm? In Manchester I went to a lunchtime Mass at the Hidden Gem in the city centre, not far from the crowds who gathered first in Albert, then St Ann’s Square. These unbidden congregations follow a ritual without ceremony, albeit one organically developing its own secular liturgy: occasional applause, hugging, laying of tributes and reading of cards.
They are not identical. Manchester, where children died, produced a carpet of teddy bears and balloons, absent from the floral tributes placed at the southern end of London Bridge. Journalists, like me, call them “spontaneous” but, increasingly, these shrines are as inevitable as vigils for those of “all faiths and none” or visits to thank the emergency services by politicians.
This is not to denigrate these displays. They go some way to displacing anger, heading off hard questions and providing those grieving with the consolation of losing themselves in the anonymity of a crowd where there is no hierarchy of bereavement.
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