Global agenda
- 2 Nov 06, 04:47 PM
I'm in Istanbul (at the ) getting to grips with the global agenda and, right now, the Turkish keyboard configuration. Both are challenging.
There's a small group of us here from the 大象传媒. Well, okay, not that small. But it's at these kind of events you realise just how enormous the 大象传媒's news operation is and just how varied is its agenda.
Our domestic television output is represented, radio too, then of course there's and World Service radio. There's also a big safety focus to this event, with the people who specialise in keeping journalists and crews out of harm sharing their experience and knowledge. The morning session ended with a grim roll call of those who have died in the name of journalism within the last year - almost two hundred.
The day had two really big themes I suppose - war and terrorism.
The keynote speaker was , UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, a man who speaks his mind. He told us how much he wished we'd be more consistent in our approach to war and disaster. He said that coverage of global catastrophes was like "a lottery", with some getting a huge amount of coverage and others getting next to nothing.
Mr Egeland talked about Darfur, which had a lot of attention from the world's media, then asked us why we had largely ignored the situation in Congo or Northern Uganda? He also talked about the media's obsession with celebrity, contrasting the time the American media devoted to Darfur versus the amount of airtime given over to Martha Stewart's brief spell behind bars. He clearly wasn't in Britain for coverage of the McCartney-Mills separation, but I suspect he'd have been less than impressed.
After a short break, while we digested what Mr Egeland had had to say, the rest of the morning was given over to the debate on embedding with the military. This subject is familiar territory now, but here was a chance for some senior military figures (retired, or about to retire) to give us their perspective on fighting with journalists in tow. There was debate about the extent to which objective journalism is compromised by being embedded with the military. The consensus, from where I was sitting, appeared to be that while embedding was useful in terms of getting access you would not otherwise get, there was still the need to have unilateral journalists going their own way.
That, of course, was what was bravely doing when he was killed. He was very much in delegates' minds today.
When is a terrorist a terrorist? It's frequently raised as an issue at the 大象传媒 and that question dominated the afternoon's proceedings as we debated the way we cover terrorism.
The person with the most experience of such matters at the 大象传媒 is probably the current affairs journalist , who has frequently reported on al-Qaeda. He shared his thoughts on the challenge of covering "terrorism" and the obvious difficulty in getting access to those who seek to promote it. Yosri Fouda of Al Jazeera has had such access. He defended his decision to interview those involved in terrorism, reminding us of the importance of context.
At the 大象传媒, we know that hearing all sides of the story is really important to our viewers, but we also know from some of the reaction to the recent Taliban film that it's a divisive issue. One person's "context" is another's "enemy propaganda". This debate rages on, as I write, and I suspect will be back on next year`s agenda.
David Kermode is editor of
