Reporter's Notebook

Dennis Bloodworth

Description

Caught pants down by a dance hostress in a Laotian nightclub; hitching a ride into battle with a chain-smoking pilot in a plane filled with cans of leaking kerosene; fielding cables that arrive in the dead of night from an editor screaming for urgent copy overnight...It's all in a day's work for the foreign correspondent, says author Dennis Bloodworth, who ought to know. He took it all in his stride during the more than 30 years that he spent as foreign correspondent of the London Observer. For those who have always wondered how the news gets into the papers, here's the story behind the stories, and even some stories that couldn't be told.

Sujets

• Travel writing

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International
• Date de parution: 21 septembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814677332
• Langue: English

Extrait

2010 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited
First published in 1988 by Times Books International
Illustrations by Chan Su-Mei
Cover art by Opal Works Co. Limited
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196
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National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data Bloodworth, Dennis.
The reporter s notebook / Dennis Bloodworth. - Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2010.
p. cm.
ISBN-13 : 978-981-4302-85-2
eISBN-13 : 978 981 4677 33 2
1. Bloodworth, Dennis - Anecdotes. 2. Reporters and reporting - Anecdotes. 3. Press and politics - Southeast Asia - Humor. 4. China - Politics and government - 1949-1976 - Humor. I. Title.
PN5449
070.4332092 - dc22 OCN657945390
Printed by KWF Printing Pte Ltd
For Malcom Muggeridge and David Astor - who gave me my chance.
In grateful acknowledgement
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all those of my colleagues who have allowed me to quote them, steal their expertise, or tell stories about them in this book, including Neal Ascherson of The Observer , Keyes Beech, formerly of the Chicago Daily News and Los Angeles Times , Michael Field of the Daily Telegraph , Richard Halloran of the New York Times , Estelle Holt, formerly of Reuters and Associated Press, Stanley Karnow, formerly of Time and the Washington Post , Anthony Lawrence of the BBC, Robert Pepper Martin, formerly of US News and World Report , Guy Searls, now with the Hongkong Standard , Frank Robertson, formerly of the Daily Telegraph , Peter Simms, formerly of Time , and Gavin Young of The Observer .
I am grateful to Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and former deputy premiers Goh Keng Swee and Sinnathamby Rajaratnam of the Singapore government, for permitting me to quote their off-the-record statements; to William E. Colby, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, for clearing one anecdote for publication; to Windsor Gregory Hackler, formerly of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, for providing the audiotapes of a seminar on journalism held in Honolulu in 1978 at which Keyes Beech, Richard Halloran and I were the speakers; to Christine Sipi re for verifying passages on Vietnam; and to Peter Watson and Geoffrey Murray of the Times Press Foundation School of Journalism in Singapore for reading the manuscript and giving me their professional comments. Above all, I should like to thank Chan Su-Mei for her apt and amusing sketches, which so happily complement the text.
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Story line
2. Goa or bust
3. The paper chase
4. Travelling light
5. Follow that story
6. One of our files is missing
7. His excellency and others
8. Officials and unofficials
9. The press and the politician
10. Man bites watchdog
11. Publish and be damned - sometimes
12. Covering conferences
13. Follow-my-leader
14. Breaking ranks
15. Ladies and gentlemen
16. The special relationship
17. Knowing the form
18. Face to face
19. Now it can be told
20. Trees of knowledge
21. Ignorance is never bliss
22. Catching it live
23. The bare facts and the naked truth
24. Through a glass darkly
25. The painted screen
26. Caught short
27. The eye of the beholder
28. The lead and the cilch
29. The Thing from another world
30. Mugshot of a reporter
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Asked if she knew who had made her, Topsy gave the immortal reply: Nobody as I knows on I spect I growed. This monograph might have said the same, for like Topsy it, too, just growed . It began as a suggestion for a lecture to a school of journalism, was translated into a limited project for a text that would provide light if minatory extramural reading for the students, and ended as another damned, thick, square book that I have written not only for my fellow journalists but for the general reader - if with some misgivings.
Misgivings because mine was a lopsided career. I spent all but three of the thirty-five years of my professional life as a foreign correspondent, most of them in the Far East. I have never covered a flower show or a divorce case or a cricket match, and have not held an editorial post since I was twenty. It is not for me to instruct the young journalist in all the techniques of the job, or lay down the law to my colleagues, let alone pronounce upon the ethical dilemmas of owners and editors. I must leave that to the experts.
But I may still have something of value for the student of journalism and the experienced reporter, even when it contradicts what others say. For the student, because every man who faces a major operation finds it useful (if not necessarily encouraging) to listen to someone who has already been through it; having heard the doctors describe it in theory, he wants to know what it was like in terms of flesh and blood - and how to cope. And for the veteran, because those who have been operated upon themselves are only too keen to compare notes with a fellow sufferer.
To the exasperation of that bored bystander, the general reader? I hope not. Intelligent people are inquisitive about each other s business, because the odd thing is that one man hardly ever knows how his neighbour does what he does. To me the skills of a stonemason are as fascinating as those of a safebreaker, for I am tantalised by my own ignorance and want to understand more. And that surely applies not only to the reporter, who makes a living out of human curiosity, but to the tinker, tailor, soldier and sailor who may well find the inside story of a journalist s professional life as interesting as it is to another journalist.
This is no school primer, moreover. Reporter s Notebook is a collection of essays on the different facets of the trade, but they are enlivened by what I trust are revealing anecdotes set against the tapestry of the times. Some of them may throw new, if incidental, light on events of the recent past in Southeast Asia and China in particular, for I have included now-it-can-be-told material that could not then be disclosed.
The book inevitably switches from country to country and year to year, since the anecdotes are not arranged chronologically to form a pictorial record of modern history, but thematically to illustrate the different kinds of problems and predicaments that beset the reporter. I have rewritten or summarised a few that appeared in two earlier books of mine, An Eye for the Dragon and The Messiah and the Mandarins , but, by the same token, they are not designed this time to underline the differences between East and West, or the ironies of the Maoist era in China; they are related solely to the journalist and his job.
I have dedicated the book to my mentors, Malcolm Muggeridge and David Astor. It is a poor return, but the least I could do. I owe them my career, I can never repay them, and meanwhile an unfair Oriental philosophy makes them responsible for all that follows (since they were unwise enough to meddle with my destiny). But Reporter s Notebook is also for all journalists of both sexes * who try to record the truth before it is burned beyond recognition on the funeral pyre of history, knowing that the closer they get to it, the more are they themselves likely to be singed. For they serve a profession one of whose many salutary qualities is that - at its best - it is the enemy of the cheat, the liar, and all those who have something disreputable to hide.
DB.
Singapore, May 1988.

* Not being a sexist, I refer to the abstract journalist as he throughout the book.

I am myself a gentleman of the Press, and I bear no other scutcheon.
- Benjamin Disraeli, to Parliment, February 1863 .
1 STORY LINE

Your turn, Blood. Tell us a yarn.
YOUR turn, Blood, a voice whispered harshly through the darkness. Tell us a yarn. It was to be my first shot at putting words together. I was starting young - the year was 1928, so I must have been about nine - and if I was caught I would be whacked, for it was after lights-out in the dorm, and the deadline for stories past. Perhaps there was an omen there, a warning of what was to come for the next sixty-odd years. But I had been an inmate of Birchington House Preparatory School for Boys for only a few months. The other three men in the room were at least two years senior to me and had intimidating names - Gascoigne, Chetwynd, Rathbone (nephew of the callous and supercilious Basil). I gulped, and obediently hammered out my lead.
There was, I said, thi