Tales From The Grind #7

August 27, 2013

Drop the Dead Donkey

Newsrooms are fucked up. Everyone watches everyone else to see who will have their Michael Douglas in Falling Down moment. They’re waiting for you to snap or get the sack so they can move into your seat. Unlike other corporate environments where you’re stabbed in the back, news hacks place a sword in front of you and push you on it.

Having spent over a decade rising from runner to deputy foreign editor (or “desk jockey” as I call it), I’ve been privy to what happens when insecurity complexes get regular doses of testosterone and Pavlovian dog treats.

Ten years ago I was a broadcast journalist on the lower rungs of Rupert Murdoch’s television news empire at Sky News. I was a text producer, writing the words that went on those little “breaking news” straps that dance across your TV screen. I pushed the button that went “whoosh” to tell you all about the bombs that dropped on Baghdad. I translated all the hot air at the UN into two lines of bite-sized information. The “textprod” was Twitter before Twitter. How very hipster.

One morning, I was at my desk preparing a string of rewritten newswires for the next bulletin. Sky’s then head of output, John Ryley, stamped over to my station. John isn’t very tall. And he’s cursed by the same speech affliction Jonathan Ross has of pronouncing his “r”s like “w”s. He listens to punk and has a secret life of liking rather cool things. His manner of dress is less than managerial – preferring comfy, moth-masticated jumpers to the executive suit. He also struck fear into the hearts of the more ruthlessly ambitious news producer (a fact often used by other producers to manipulate their co-workers). His best mate from school is Eddie Izzard and I once caught him humming “Anarchy in the UK” in the corridor outside the edit suites.

I digress. John Ryley stamped towards my desk. He was clutching a fax.

“Can you read this?” he said, depositing three pages on my desk.

“It’s in Mandarin, John,” I said.

“So you can read it?”

“I’m Filipino, John. We use a different sort of squiggly language.”

Some years later I was walking past his office. I’d since moved on to working on the Foreign Desk where I was once jokingly told before entering Gaza that kidnapping would be good for my career. He was in conference with a freshly recruited producer – newsroom plankton with his sights set on greater things.

“Leah!”

“Yes, John?” I said staring at a poster advertising the Sky News Beijing bureau in a Chinese propaganda style.

“Gary Gilmore.”

“What about him?”

“Who is he?”

“A murderer executed in America who requested his eyes be used for transplants. Hence the punk song by the Adverts, Looking Through Gary Gilmore’s Eyes.”

He then shot me a “you can fuck off now, I’ve proved my point” look. I suspect John made a cultural reference that totally passed by the young producer and needed to show that he wasn’t old.

I despaired at the lack of general knowledge from anyone under 30. Plucked from the finest schools and thrust into graduate programmes they still wrote round-robin emails like “Leonard Cohen’s version of Hallelujah is on the server under P12345”. I replied – with snark – “It’s not his version. It’s his bloody song.”

Let’s not get into what I said to the overnight reporter who asked me to tell her “very quickly” the history of the Palestine/Israel conflict. The Middle East reporter was reluctant to send over a breakfast news package so the overnight hack got the job while we tried to persuade them. The overnight hack cobbled together paragraphs from newswires and Wikipedia. Offended that their patch was being sullied by some “Roedean girl with more ponies than sense”, our Middle East reporter knuckled down to craft a minute-and-a-half voice track which we laid over agency pictures and archive.

Fast forward to the 2008 Mumbai attacks. The world’s media descended on India’s largest city with a circus of reporters, producers, researchers and engineers. Sky sent over multiple teams patched together with people from different bureaux around the world, including a new (and our only) reporter who bore Indian heritage. His producer texted me “What the fuck is he doing here? He can’t even speak the language!”

Common sense lapses, obvs. The accounts department once sent out the following notice:

“It has been brought to my attention that people have been using the words “bribe” or “fraud” when submitting their expense claims. Whilst in most cases this has arisen because people are covering fraud or bribery cases, please can everybody refrain from using these words in future. Sky doesn’t tolerate the use of bribery or fraud in the workplace and has to investigate each case.”

In an office where it seemed the primary journalistic concern was one’s own position in the corporate structure and not the rose-tinted idealism of telling stories to make people understand the world a bit better, the foreign desk was a haven. It’s where you found journalists that still gave a shit – albeit a jaded shit laced with sarcasm. It’s also where you found journalists who could care less about court cases and weather stories and seethed resentment when made to cover them. Foreign news requires a macabre sense of humour littered with obscenity. This was the same industry that held an “oh what a lovely war” party after George W Bush declared the Iraq War over in May 2003.

Lebanon. 2006. Another war. I was trying to locate one of our field producers in Tyre to co-ordinate an update and a live feed. The Israelis were flying bomb-laden sorties over our satellite position.

“Nick. Where’ve you been?”

“I went down to the beach. Some American journos wrote “UN” in the sand. I modified it a little.”

“What?”

“I put a “c” in the front of it and a “t” at the end.”

I recently texted an old friend reporting from Syria.

“How are you mate?”

“At Syrian border. Mega death.”

The key to learning how a newsroom ticks is understanding that everyone resents everybody else. Those at the bottom rungs of the ladder try to kick everyone else off in their upward climb. Those at the top try to saw the rungs in half so the lower orders can’t get near them. Somewhere in the middle, common bonds are formed. The sort that you hear braying out of the bar at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem where your surname suddenly adopts a public school modification like “Smithy”. They’re genuine, human bonds. But it’s best remembered that these are the people whose words and images determine what you know about the world around you. It’s a clusterfuck. A psychotherapist’s wet dream..

By Leah Borromeo | @monstris