Adventures in Correspondentland (45 page)

Across the Arab world, there was a new appetite for political reform. Its impetus came from the young, who demonstrated how a social network on the web could quickly take on the character of a revolutionary network on the streets. The Arab Spring, the most stunning popular uprising since the 1989 revolutions across Eastern Europe, brought down the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak after almost 30 years, and no Arab autocrat could consider himself safe. For all the panicked cries from embattled leaders that Islamic extremists were behind the demonstrations – here, they were essentially playing the ‘war on terror' card as if it read ‘get out of jail' – groups such as al-Qaeda were only peripheral, if present at all.

Elsewhere on the despot front, Kim Jong-il continued his bizarre reign in Pyongyang – the cover story of
The Economist
I had bought at JFK Airport to mug up for my BBC interview was on his ascent to power. In Cuba, a Castro, Raúl, was still in charge, which meant that while it was possible to enjoy a Happy Meal at Guantanamo, the same could not be said of Havana.

What of my homeland? Certainly, Britain remained conspicuously more post-Diana than pre-: less class orientated, vastly more celebrity obsessed, and regularly prone to exaggerated emotional responses, whether in celebration of long-awaited Ashes victory, the improbable success of Scottish songstresses on television talent competitions, the death of talentless reality stars or the premature exit of England from the World Cup.

In the hands of the mass media, and the tabloids especially, the British public seem especially malleable. Whenever I have returned during the dozen or so years I have been away, the country also seems to be in a state of crisis or in the midst of some tabloid feeding frenzy. Once, it was a fuel strike, when farmers and
lorry drivers came close to bringing the country to a standstill by picketing a small handful of oil refineries. On another occasion, it was the tragic disappearance of the toddler Madeleine McCann.

Britain was also emphatically a post-Thatcherite country: deeply suspicious of Brussels and the rest of Europe, watchful of mass immigration, reliant for its prosperity on the financial sector rather than manufacturing, more meritocratic, and a nation in which both the unions and landed Establishment were still very much on the back foot. Tony Blair's success came from standing before the British people as Thatcher's true successor, while David Cameron owed his rise to being the heir of Blair. John Major and Gordon Brown struggled partly because they were less adept at handling Thatcher's legacy.

Once Britain's most polarising figure, the Iron Lady was now viewed widely, even by many of her one-time detractors, as the one person capable of delivering the electric-shock treatment that Britain had so desperately needed at the end of the '70s. However, even Thatcher could not completely arrest Britain's post-imperial decline, nor resolve the Acheson dilemma of finding a clear role after losing an empire.

Britain had also become a post-9/11 country. The attacks continued to define its politics and contributed to its mood of apprehension. Having aligned himself so successfully with Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair ran into trouble when he walked in lockstep with George W. Bush. There had never been much public enthusiasm for Britain's involvement in Iraq, while there was also mounting concern about the blood price paid by British servicemen in Afghanistan. The radicalisation of young British Muslims meant the threat of home-grown attacks was ever present.

At least terrorism had largely been consigned to history in
Northern Ireland. The Belfast terror tour that I made sure to embark on shortly before joining the BBC had now become a heritage trail. Sinn Féin has even set up a gift shop on the Falls Road selling mural mousepads, Republican resistance calendars and IRA fridge magnets.

Moreover, we could ponder the relative success of the peace process in fashionable, glass-fronted restaurants in city-centre streets once completely disfigured by the flying shrapnel of car bombs. In another unlikely twist, former Republican paramilitaries, such as Martin McGuinness, entered into a power-sharing arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party, Sinn Féin's long-time enemies and Northern Ireland's most faithful practitioners of the politics of ‘No'. Why, the queen could even visit Dublin, resplendent in emerald green.

In a country with a fixation with heritage and nostalgia, there were so many post-somethings. Outside of the arts and fashion, perhaps Britain had lost the knack of being pre-something. Yet winning the right to stage the Olympics in 2012 presented the chance to redefine itself with a forthcoming event rather than a landmark from history, such as the Blitz or the Somme. I happened to be in London on the night it edged out Paris, New York and Madrid, and there was a palpable sense of reorientation, especially among the young. Then, the following morning came the 7/7 bomb attacks that killed 52 people and made Britons less eager future seekers.

As for Australia, it prepared to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of
The Lucky Country
with many of the questions raised by Donald Horne still far from being resolved: the relationship with Asia, the umbilical ties to Britain, its receptiveness to new immigrants and the plight of the first
Australians. On these issues, I would like to write that the country was in a state of suspenseful indecision, and in the midst of some impassioned national debate. However, it would be more accurate to describe the mood as one of apathetic irresolution.

Because it is a building of such multiple entendres, I have always thought the Sydney Opera House serves as an ideal national icon. Through the international architectural competition that crowned an unknown Dane as its winner, Australia indicated how much more outward-looking it had become in the years after the war. New immigrants from southern Europe provided much of the manpower for its construction. Paul Robeson, the black American opera star, even performed an impromptu concert amidst the scaffolding and cranes, a musical foreshadowing, perhaps, of the end of the White Australia policy.

In the selection of the foreign architect Jørn Utzon, at the instigation of the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, there were traces of the cultural cringe. The manner of Utzon's constructive dismissal, an unintentionally unfortunate phrase, was also a reminder of how the creative and ingenious could be crushed by the leaden hand of mediocrity and stultifying conservatism. The building was funded partly by lottery money, hinting at Australia's bawdy licentiousness, but the man who pressed originally for a purpose-built concert venue, Eugene Goossens, the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, ended up being arrested at Sydney Airport in the mid-1950s for carrying mildly pornographic material.

The queen opened the new Opera House, reinforcing the constitutional link with Britain. However, an Aboriginal person also participated in those inaugural celebrations – a necessary nod towards the original inhabitants of Bennelong Point. By then, the
Opera House had staged its first concerts. Sir Charles Mackerras conducted the prelude to
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
on one evening and Rolf Harris sang ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport' on another.

Since then, the Opera House has been used as a billboard for anti-war protesters, while it also provided the stage for the visit of George W. Bush. It has served as a backdrop for everything from Spencer Tunick's mass nudity to the final of
Australian Idol
, from the Olympics to Oprah. Its distinctive shells have also featured on all manner of corporate and cultural logos, from the Sydney Writers' Festival to the demolition company hurling a wrecking ball at a row of turn-of-the-century houses opposite where I write – an act of architectural vandalism that seems, at once, against the original spirit of the Opera House and in complete harmony with its thwarted eventuation. But the overriding reason why the Opera House works so well as a national symbol is because it is unfinished and incomplete, and that this is met with public indifference.

On the night of Obama's victory, CNN used what it described as hologram technology to teleport a correspondent,
Star Trek
-style, from Grant Park in Chicago to its studio in New York so that she could be interviewed, face to virtual face, by the anchorman Wolf Blitzer. Though I am glad to report that the BBC continues to cling to the quaint notion that the point of having correspondents in the field is to leave them there, it showed the advances in technology that are continually speeding past our industry.

Young reporters no longer wield razor blades and chinagraph pencils nor suffer from Uher droop. Instead, they carry
pocket-sized digital recorders that could easily be mistaken for a cigarette case. The BBC Washington bureau can now boast more than the two mobile phones that we used to share between correspondents, and that had to be signed out whenever taken from the office. Everyone has an iPhone or a BlackBerry, or often both. Editing equipment that used to fill an entire hotel room has been superseded by inexpensive laptops. The satellite technology required to broadcast from anywhere on the planet can also fit in carry-on luggage, while in many places satellites themselves are entirely superfluous because correspondents can broadcast over the internet via a glorified version of Skype.

The days are long passed when we used to race miles, or sometimes even fly, to reach a satellite-uplink station so that we could bounce our stories, galactically, back to London. All we need now are our own portable satellite dishes, which are smaller in size than a breakfast tray. Transmitting a news report from the field back to base has become much like sending an email with a hefty attachment, so we just need a decent broadband connection.

Soon after joining the BBC, I remember an old hand in the newsroom who was something of a computer geek predicting that the future of journalism belonged to reporters who could master the logarithms of programming. How ludicrous, I remember thinking. But then came WikiLeaks.

More so than any other advance, the internet has revolutionised our modus operandi. News is just a click away, and it's incessantly updated with each blink of the eye. With the expectation that correspondents will file as soon as possible, deadlines have been drastically compressed and traditional news cycles have gone the way of the typewriter, the reel-to-reel tape machine and the newspaper copy-takers who used to sit at one end of a crackly
phone line trying to decipher the dispatches of half-cut reporters in the field.

In harness with new satellite technology, the worldwide web has also brought about one of the greatest breakthroughs in global news-gathering: the ability to broadcast from anywhere at any time. Alas, it is also responsible for one of the greatest threats to global news-gathering: the ability to broadcast from anywhere at any time. Because of the preponderance of continuous-news channels – the BBC has four alone – and the round-the-clock demand for material, this has been particularly pernicious. The unrelenting demands of having to file every hour of every day means that not as much time is allotted any more for what correspondents need the most: patient observation to divine a country's underlying characteristics. On big, running stories, often journalists rarely get the chance to leave their rooftop live positions, from where they end up delivering fairly cramped commentaries based on fairly skimpy experiences.

Watch any news channel these days and it will not be long before it serves up a promotional video boasting of its vast global reach and ability to respond to breaking news in an instant. Doubtless, you will be familiar with the genre: the fast-paced jump cuts, the global landmarks, the behind-the-scenes footage of gesticulating reporters, and the on-camera assurances from correspondents promising to fix news whenever it breaks – and from all four corners of the planet.

Yet there is a gulf of difference between the round-the-clock, round-the-world ability to broadcast and nuanced foreign coverage. Indeed, the very thing that news organisations now trumpet, which is to say their speedy reaction times to breaking events, is often a bar to understanding. Commonly, correspondents
are summoned to their live positions to tell the rest of the world what is going on without being given sufficient time to properly find out for themselves. The BBC, which has always prided itself on giving correspondents the space and time in which to operate, knows this and tries hard to manage the demand from London. Still, reporters are being asked to do more for less, when foreign news should truly live by the maxim ‘less is more'.

The one-click-away availability of information on the internet has also altered the balance of power between correspondents on the ground and editors in London. Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube and, to a lesser extent, Facebook have greatly empowered editors by giving them access to a vast quantity of up-to-the-second information. Yet information is not the same as journalism, and the process that turns one into the other has traditionally been where experienced correspondents have earned their spurs. Even the most self-regarding of foreign hacks would never be so presumptuous as to suggest they have a monopoly on understanding, but the act of being stationed for years in a foreign country, of reading its history and literature, of talking to its people, of poring over its newspapers every day and of sifting through its flotsam and jetsam does give them an edge. The view from our window generally offers a better vantage point than the view from the newsdesk in London, however many computer terminals or plasma screens it might boast.