Around 10 years ago I saw the late, great Daily Telegraph journalist Bill Deedes talking about changes in international reporting since the 70s. Bill's career started in the 30s as an African reporter, immortalised in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop novel as William Boot reporting on the the Second Italo-Abyssian War of 1936.
With the emergence of online & 24 hour news coverage current affairs would appear to have benefited. Bill highlighted the opposite had happened. International reporting on Africa had plummeted since the beginning of the 80s, and the new technology was being used to circulate an increasing national, media & celebrity news. This pattern has continued spiraling like a tornado. Only some Twitter accounts & channels like Al Jazeera provide blockade against the 'celebrity' news garbage.
I was always interested in international affairs; being an 'odd' child ie preferred books to football (greatly preferred), and my father's years in North Africa, the Middle East and Korea provided a family interest in everything Arab, Israeli & further horizons.
The big international events in my early childhood were the arrival of Bangladeshi refuges, Vietnamese boat people & 3 TV events, that as Bill intimated would not be one TV news now as they were then:
BBC news started one evening, on a weekday, as I had come home from St Joseph's Convent, that Idi Amin of Uganda had been deposed. Footage showed crushed wire fences where UNITA rebels had stormed in the final defeat of Amin, who fled to Saudi Arabia
The most startling news footage I ever saw came from Iran in 1978. Ethiopia 84 was harrowing as opposed to shocking.
The ITN 5.45 news titles started. This was in an age where news programmes emphasised news & not colourful graphics as their reason to broadcast.Superimposed on the 5:45 ITN News logo was new film of an Iranian soldier lying flat on top of a tall building, the cameraman standing behind him, as he fired a heavy machine gun, a weapon that can bring down a plane, into the crowds of Tehran below.
Of the crowds only the massed throngs which blocked out the pavements & road could be seen. But closer to the building, hidden by its balcony were the crowds that the Shah's soldier was firing live ammunition into. He kept adjusting his position, so clearly aiming at the people.
I haven't seen any news footage similar to this broadcast on British news channels in 35 years. It can be recorded but clearly it is deemed too 'disturbing' for the public; whereas I do want to see what is committed by governments. In the case of the Shah of Iran, it was also his Prime Minister Jafar Sharif-Emami who's actions by ordering the Black Friday massacre in October led to the riots now on the news.
The third one was the Khmer Rouge - that's for another post.
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