I
notice from the recent missive by the Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of The Guardian (about which I had
something to say previously in Chronicle 10 on January 4) that the diversity of
her newsroom has become a major concern for her. I belong to probably the last generation of
reporters who were able to get a job just by, as it were, walking in off the street.
No journalism schools in those days, so one could expect to meet any sort of
person, from whichever income or social group, colour or creed, treading the
newsroom, whereas now attendance at journalism schools (most of which appear to
be financed at least to some degree, by newspaper proprietors ) is apparently
the essential part of the preparation.
It has long been my theory that
journalism schools are designed for brainwashing (at the extreme) or certainly
for homogenizing those who are to be entrusted by the owners with the task of reporting
to the general reader what is happening in society. And it is this that Ms.
Viner is talking about, because in this world in which diversity is more prized
than it used to be, she has become ever more aware of the limited range of
white middle-class guys and gals who comprise the overwhelming number of her
reporters.
I remember when I got my first job in
Canada in 1954 in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, that we were a rare mix of reporters:
a guy from Jamaica with no particular schooling that I ever heard about; a young
South African whose ambition was to write thriller-novels; an English blue-blood,
descendant of the poet Wordsworth, who had been cozzened by the finest
education and social upbringing money could buy; me, a rough old half-educated
colonial boy fresh from the wilds of New Zealand; and our photographer was Fred
Bruemmer, just learning the job after having been a miner in Kirkland Lakes
gold mines. But Fred was a Latvian who became famous for his later career as the photographer and chronicler of Inuit
life across the Canadian Arctic, and whose earlier education came as an inmate
in Nazi concentration camps. We were not an especially talented group, but two
of us received the Order of Canada in later life.
The only disadvantage I ever spotted
from this right-off-the-street method of hiring reporters was that quite a few
of them couldn’t write for sour apples, although there were always the occasional
few to whom writing was their purpose and meaning in life. I fell halfway
between these two: although not temperamentally ideal for the job of sticking
my nose into other people’s business, I never had any trouble hammering
together a newspaper article in a few minutes.
So I always ended towards feature articles on subjects that were of
interest to me, rather than the daily grind of following the latest happening,
whatever it was. Still, I was thrown in off the deep end, as it were,
immediately given assignments which in larger newspapers would have taken me
years to graduate to. I was pretty shocked when I arrived at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1957 to find that
an apprentice reporter could expect to spend at least 18 months doing nothing
but listen to the police radio. And even after that he could be confined to the
obituary desk.
I never really enjoyed covering
meetings, not after the first one, an all-day meeting of the Southland County
Council, an element of local government, always comprised of elected farmers,
whose bailiwick covered an immense territory at the south of the South Island
of New Zealand. The farmers lit up the moment they sat down, and continued
smoking all day until the room was clogged with smoke and my throat was protesting,
an experience that might have had something to do with my never having become
as smoker.
The farmers, of course, came from the
Southland plain, originally a damp, low-lying, swampy area, but one that had
been transformed by hard work into some of the most productive farming land in
the country. They also had jurisdiction
over the superb fiordland, a virtually uninhabited area of lush rain forest,
mountains, and deep sounds and inlets. I have often thought of the impact that
the very existence of this wilderness might have had on my own outlook on life.
The area had at least one well-known inhabitant, a hermit called Arawata Bill,
who had been seen by very few people from outside, and talked to by even fewer.
We had a family friend, an outdoorsman, who had spoken to Bill, and who, when I
was nine, took me and another boy on a bicycle trip into the foothills of this
wilderness. I have never forgotten it. We
rode our bikes as far as we could up the gorge of a swiftly flowing river, before
leaving the bikes and branching off up tributary streams, in one memorable
moment coming upon a hillside entirely covered with mint: the scent from this was
overwhelming, and completely unforgettable. Later, as a reporter, I
occasionally had to go up to the edge of this wilderness to await the arrival
of rescuers who had gone in in search of lost trampers, who usually emerged
bedraggled, and sometimes injured. So this fiordland could be a place of life
or death.
Another assignment, much less dramatic, built into the very nature of our landscape, was
to cover the agricultural fairs that each of the many farming villages held
every summer. These were certainly pleasant events, but they were a hell of a
lot of work for me. My job was to
collect the results, and it seemed like every farming family in the district had
entered some member in one or other of the competitions. There were competitions
for every variety and class of animal --- among sheep, for example, Merino,
Dorset, Leicesters, Southdown, with different grades --- lambs, hoggets,
two-tooth wethers; among dairy cows Holstein-Friesians, Jerseys, Herefords;
among horses, the lordly Clydesdale took pride of place, and then the jumping
horses, the fancy trotters. I recall one mistake I made which caused great
hilarity among the farmers: I mistook a bull for a bullock (I’m still not sure
what the difference is.) Then, the kids were into Highland dancing with their
reels, hornpipes and jigs, and woe betide me if I confused any of these
categories. Never to forget the he-man events, tossing the caber, the underhand
chop, single-handed sawing….in that part of the world we had world champions,
the famous Fraser Brothers, with the double-handed sawing. Real hard men they
all were, out of the forests or off the farms, and I had to get all the results
and record them for Monday’s paper, for if I missed one, all hell would break
loose. I still have the smell of those fairs in my nostrils, long after I can
no longer smell anything.
My Saturdays were from the first
devoted to collecting the scores from all the games played. I had been a
competitive runner, and in addition, played cricket and Rugby regularly at
weekends in season, but this job put an end to all that.
When I first stepped into a court of
justice I had no more idea of how they worked than of the man in the moon. But
it was from the courts that I began to realize there is a class of people who
simply can’t handle their lives, and are always getting into trouble. I felt
sorry for them, falling into the hands of the police. I knew one of those
police detectives: he was a fast bowler on one of the cricket teams I played
against, and, hearing him give evidence in court, I began to think of him as the
ideal example of someone I would always want to stay away from: keep away from
the police became a rule in my life.
The Stipendary Magistrate, Rex
Abernathy S.M., as we characterized him in print, was a man who kept himself
aloof from the community, who never spoke in a companionable way to anyone in the
court, whether onlooker or functionary, and who could be depended upon to give
fair, but always rather severe judgment. I only once made a severe mistake in
my reports of court cases: that was when I reported that a man charged with
murder had pleaded guilty, when, in fact, he had pleaded not guilty, rather a
significant error. Of course, I knew he
had pleaded not guilty: it was just one of those aberrative errors that
everyone makes from time to time, a simple typing error that I had not picked up, which earned
me a severe bollocking from the editor, who, when he calmed down, said, “Oh, well,
at least you can spell.”
When five years later I covered the
courts in the tropical town of Mackay, in northern Queensland, Australia, the
atmosphere was completely different. The magistrate, Mr. Baker, was a hail-fellow-well-met
Aussie, who had gotten to know his customers quite well. The working class in
that part of the world were mostly canecutters in the sugar fields, a
tough-as-hell job which wore them out to the point they could no longer do it,
and then they were tossed aside. That was their time for appearing in court,
charged with being drunk in a public place: I remember one fellow who was
making his 278th appearance on that charge, and was so well-known to
the court that, after passing the usual sentence, the magistrate would come
down into the court and chat amiably to the accused, as if they were old
friends. We would never have put up with that kind of informality in New
Zealand, certainly not in the Scottish south of the country, anyway.
From the very first I was aware that
newspapers used the disadvantaged as fodder for stories, but never showed any
real interest in improving their condition. This brings me back to Ms. Viner’s
complaint about the lack of scope of her homogenous band of reporters: you need
all sorts if they are to know something about, and sympathize with, all sorts
of people out there.
A curious thing I noticed during my
years as a journalist is that in most meetings that are held, the outcome of
the subject under discussion is usually known well in advance. This seems to be
true even when weighty subjects of great importance are being discussed. I cannot
remember a Parliamentary debate, for example, in which the outcome was not
evident from the first. (I do remember one, however, on some delicate subject like abortion, in which the Archbishop
of Canterbury spoke in favour of the motion, but voted against it. Ah, democracy,
we all loves you!)
In all my many years of following politics
I can recall only one genuinely democratic debate on any subject: it took place
at an annual meeting of the British Labour Party in the early 1960s, and concerned
whether the party should pledge Britain to nuclear disarmament. The argument
was spirited, the leaders of the Party (all of them university-educated) naturally arguing for the status quo, while
the leftists, always the rogue element in the party as in society, passionately
argued for disarmament. In the event, the disarmers won the vote.
Not that it made any difference. Three
or four years later, Labour came to power in Britain, but the Wilson government
carried on with the old policy just as if their party membership had never
spoken.
And today, more than half a century
later, Britain has recently decided to continue
hosting the American-made Trident missile, which the current Labour leader
Jeremy Corbyn has always opposed, or simply keep it for eventual use against
--- well, who was that again? Why, Russia, probably, even though it is now so
weakened compared with the grand Soviet days.
The military-industrial complex, that
President Eisenhower warned us against in the 1950s, and that still dominates
the economies of the Western powers, has apparently decided never to allow Britain
to withdraw from the nuclear standoff, no matter how pointless and dangerous it
may be.
No comments:
Post a Comment