The differences between TV news operations in the UK and US are shown by the tragic deaths of four newsmen when their helicopters crashed while covering a police chase in Phoenix, Arizona.

There were five TV news helicopters in the air at the time when two of them collided while recording the pursuit of a man accused of stealing two trucks and ramming a police car.

Alan D. Mutter, a veteran journalist and news executive, described the deaths as underscoring the stupidity and wastefulness of broadcasters who squander precious resources.

He writes in Reflections of a Newsosaur:

This journalistically indefensible insanity must be stopped. If broadcasters won’t do it voluntarily, then the Federal Aviation Administration, acting on behalf of us innocents on the ground, ought to step in and do it for them.

He says the cost of a modest helicopter with a crew of two is no leass than $1 million a year — enough to hire 10 to 15 journalists to develop real stories.
(via LostRemote)

Suffolk has had little flooding in recent weeks so I have watched the inundation of papers with hyperbole in coverage as events in the north and west unfolded with some detachment.

The floods have certainly been bad, terrible events for those affected. Yet the are not the end-of-the-world catastrophes which much of the coverage seems to suggest.

I know the Tewkesbury and Gloucester areas. They flood regularly, usually not as badly as the did this year. Walk around Tewkesbury and walls have marks, like measures of a child’s growth, showing the level flood waters reached in various years.

A pub near the Severn used to keep an amphibious car to ferry customers when the river flooded. The University of Gloucestershire has a Lower Severn Community Flood Information Network which earlier this year was appealing for memories of floods, particularly those of 1947, the 1960s, 1998 and 2000.

Peter Wilby in his Media Guardian column, headed Up to our necks in hype, today begins the inquest on press coverage: "’What went wrong?’ asked the Times and the Guardian last week. ‘It rained a lot" was not the answer they were looking for.’" He writes:

By the time you read this, press excitement, along with the waters, may have subsided. You will have to wait weeks, if not months, for the truth. In any disaster, estimates of casualties and damage start low and then rise steeply as journalists get to work (they ask as many council officials and members of the emergency services as they can find, and then take the highest estimates), only to fall sharply when everyone has calmed down. It was said last month that 16,000 homes had been affected by floods in Hull. You could be forgiven for missing last week’s report that the true figure was 6,500.

Newspapers, and before them chroniclers, have always dramatised already dramatic natural events. Yet there is a difference. As Wilby says: "Such events are traditionally described as acts of God but, despite the efforts of the Bishop of Carlisle, the press has written the deity out of the script. "Whose finger is on the nuclear button?" the papers used to ask. Now they want to know whose finger is in the dyke - or, rather, who’s taken their finger out."

To ask questions of this kind is not to deny climate change. My feeling is that very nasty weather is happening more frequently and we need to work on reducing its impact. But the culture of blame, fanned by jouralists, we have seen in the past few weeks will not help.

Like Kevin Marsh "something bugs me" but I didn’t know what about the story of the Mirror’s two reporters being arrested planting a tracking device on a train to test security. As Marsh says: "Yes - of course checking those assurances about our security is legit; but, please, when you’ve shown that guys who plant stuff on trains get caught … say so."

That’s it. Security worked and the Mirror should have seen that story as being as big as one about a lapse by the police. 

 Alistair Burnett, editor of the BBC’s World Tonight, has a good post on the overuse of the word crisis by journalists. On The Editors Blog he writes:

One of the values BBC journalism puts great emphasis on trying to live up to is accuracy. On top of that, language is the most basic of tools for a journalist. So using it accurately is essential. Though dramatic words help make our stories stand out, we have to guard very carefully against being tempted into hyperbole.

If he needs a little more ammunition to get his message across the his BBC colleagues, these are the first ten results from a Google News search for "crisis" on the BBC news site this morning:

• Tories ponder major crisis force (What on earth does that mean?)
• Debt crisis hits Chrysler buyout
• Warning of children’s TV ‘crisis’ (Note the disassociating quotes)
• Flood crisis operation launched
• In pictures: Darfur crisis
• Flood crisis test for Brown
• Leadership crisis hits Togo FA
• Land ‘no cure for housing crisis’
• Darfur crisis ’spilling into CAR’
• The “L” word (liquidity crisis, it seems)

Comments in brackets are mine. Burrnett’s point is made: what a lazy lot of headlines.

Storytelling did not escape Mindy McAdams as she learned to be a video journalist at a boot camp. Her 1 minute 30 second look at an El Salvadorian restaurant in Washington DC provided a cameo of immigrant life in the city.

Although I have never been to south or central America I was convinced of its authenticity by the soccer match playing the television while a singer performed. Just like Spain, although the food is a reminder that the tortillas are very different.

Video storytelling is very different to a print story too, as Mindy found out. "This is not print reporting, and if I want to learn to tell a visual story, then I’ve got to check my print techniques at the door," she writes.

Not all of them, I think. There is a reporter’s curiosity in both the restaurant video and another on a bike shop she has posted. Both would fit well beside a written story, illustrating in a way words cannot.

The story of the Manchester Evening News reporter who got a leaked document, rang up the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities for a comment, and was surprised when they released the contents to all and sundry before his story was published, puzzles me.

Has Manchester journalism gone soft over the years? Or was the reporter simply naive in not realising there was a chance that the AGMA would spoil his exclusive?

The reporter, David Ottewell, is affronted that some people, as a result, think his "exclusive" was less than it seemed. He writes in his The Party Animal" blog:

Specifically, it has been pointed out that I described the story as based on a "leak" - but by the time our papers hit the streets a press release, embargoed until 8am and containing results from the poll, had been sent out to other journalists.

That is true. And I’m not particularly happy about it.

What happened was this. AGMA intended to release the poll [on congestion charging] on Monday. I managed to get a leaked copy on Thursday.

… I knew the results were coming out, and I wanted to get them first. I found a way.

I contacted a relevant spokesperson to tell them I had the results and intended to publish them on Friday morning. Would AGMA, or the GMPTA, like to comment?

That’s responsible journalism - giving people the right to reply to our stories.

The spokesperson went away and came back some hours later to tell me that they intended to release the results, pretty much immediately, to everyone.

After a bit of a row, they instead offered to put the results out widely, but very late on Thursday night and with instructions to other journalists that they were not to be used until 8am. Not ideal, but the best we could get.

It seems to me to be the entirely predictable result of ringing up the "spokesperson" when he did. That gave the press office the chance to keep the rest of the media sweet and avoid a uncomfortable barrage from other journalists.

The rule I have always followed is that if you have an exclusive you don’t tell anyone who might spoil it until it is too late for them to pass it on to other reporters. In this case it seems Ottewell had a copy the document and there was no doubt about its authenticity so there was not need to give them a lot of time to respond. (Via Holdthefrontpage)

Stephen Glover in the Independent today takes some pleasure from the Guardian’s Ben Goldacre dismantling of a story on autism and MMR in the Observer. I suspect Glover must have written about the sibling spat before seeing the "clarification" in yesterday’s Observer. It is really more of a correction and runs to 847 words.

As Glover says: Some may say it is grown-up for one newspaper to be able to attack another in the same group. No doubt it is. Yet, one cannot help wondering whether the publication of this piece in unexpurgated form did not reflect irritation on the part of The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, at The Observer’s distinct populist identity."

Journalists at the Herald titles in Glasgow are expected to stage a second strike this week following the walk-out of 200 on Friday over editorial cuts, according to Scotland on Sunday. The Edinburgh paper also reports the management is understood to have de-recognised the National Union of Journalists in pursuit of £3m of cuts.

This dispute is about more than editorial cuts — it is about the future of quality journalism in Scotland. As the Independent on Sunday, in London, says:

A nation that anticipated media excellence to emerge naturally from the creation of the Scottish Parliament has been disappointed. Scottish Television has cut staff and reduced its news and current affairs output; BBC Scotland has suffered a 25 per cent reduction in the same departments. Recent investment at The Scotsman cannot disguise a circulation less than half that of the Scottish edition of the Daily Mail.

While political power has been repatriated to Edinburgh, media power is heading in the opposite direction, leaving Scotland short of the indigenous newspaper and broadcast culture required to scrutinise its infant political institutions. Journalists say that is the real backdrop to strike action in Glasgow.

No wonder the BBC is being derailed: it is answerable to a Trust that believes there is merit in a wagon wheel with a shifting centre and spokes that go in all directions (BBC Trust report on impartiality).

That was a month ago. Today Peter Preston in his Observer media column, under the heading "Petty crimes and little justice", concludes: "Trust is a five letter word. So is panic." He writes about the aftermath of revelations of viewers being misled, saying:  

There’s no natural justice to any of this; it’s more of a regulatory arms race than due process. Ofcom is there because (clause 2.11 of its code) it must ensure that ‘competitions are conducted fairly’. The trustees are (rather less obviously) there because they have a duty to ‘represent the interest of licence fee papers’ and ensure ‘open, transparent operation’ - which involves commissioning a code of practice from the BBC executive board and ‘monitoring’ its observance. The executive board is there to do what’s right anyway, because it’s right. And the Yard is seemingly always on call for a headline.

Back in May, Media Guardian led with a story saying:

With the Trust now the arbiter of which projects get the go-ahead - and even making retrospective decisions over whether services live or die - insiders say that innovative thinking is finding it harder to surface. And with commercial companies (including the Guardian) lobbying to try to scale back the BBC’s impact on the commercial world, the Trust is finding it difficult to balance a public service commitment against the fear of damaging the interests of industry stakeholders.

The Trust was set up with three objectives:

1. Sustaining a strong BBC that is independent of Government and responsive to the needs of licence fee payers;
2. ensuring that the BBC is able to adapt to the rapidly changing media environment;
3. reassuring the BBC’s competitors that the BBC will avoid undue impact on what is a thriving and creative marketplace.

Its record so far is not reassuring. I pay a licence fee and have lost trust in the Trust.

Ian Jack has a fascinating piece on the altered reality of documentary film makers in the Guardian today. The BBC trailer which used a picture of the Queen in an apparent strop after celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz had asked her to remove her tiara, is his peg. In reality the picture was of the Queen entering the room for the photographic session.

Jack tells a story which suggests that altered reality applies just as much to still photography. He went to Los Angeles to interview Michael Caine but was firmly turned away at the star’s home.

Later he got the explanation that Leibovitz, who was to take the photographs, had insisted Caine dress in clothes she had brought with her. Caine told Jack: "I wasn’t having any of that crap. I wear my own clothes."

The large crew of assistants and the equipment used by Leibovitz to help create her images is well documented and requires the full co-operation of her subjects. Or, as Wikipedia puts it, is "marked by a close collaboration between the photographer and the subject".

How far this collaboration goes is demonstrated by an article in Salon in 2000 by author Brett Leveridge on the day Leibovitz photographed him for a book cover. He wrote:

"I like your beard in person," she says of my tiny goatee, "but I’m not sure it’s working in all these shots. Why don’t you shave it and we’ll shoot some more?"

Fine by me, of course. I’m not going to decline the opportunity to have Leibovitz shoot another round of pictures of my mug. She sends someone out for a razor and shaving cream and, upon their return, I head for the bathroom and off comes the goatee. We do another 30 or 45 minutes of shooting before I make my way back out into the chill Manhattan afternoon, walking approximately 6 inches off the ground.

It makes asking the Queen to take off her tiara sound trivial.