This year’s most compulsive television viewing came on BBC News 24 last week, when they interviewed the wrong man. They were doing a story about the legal battle over registered trademarks between the computer company Apple and the Beatles’ record label, Apple Corps. They intended to speak to an acclaimed information technology expert, Guy Kewney, but some hapless researcher went to the wrong reception area and somehow brought into the studio Guy Goma, a Congolese business graduate with an extremely limited grasp of the English language. One of those identikit, bloodless and chirpy News 24 anchor babes carried out the interview regardless: Mr Goma’s answers were wonderfully uninformed and, because of his accent, almost unintelligible. The chap had been waiting down in the reception area for a job interview at the BBC (presumably as a newsreader: diversity is strength, remember) when summoned to the studio. The real pleasure to be taken from this misconceived live encounter was the look of appalled astonishment on Mr Goma’s face when he was introduced to viewers as an IT expert; his eyes widened like they do in cartoons and his jaw dropped several inches. But he soldiered on, bless him. Mr Goma knew almost as little about information technology as the anchor babe and the BBC correspondent who later, blankly, commented upon his contribution.
And much fun was to be had at the BBC’s expense afterwards. Here, after all, was the emperor revealed brazenly in the altogether; News 24, with its constant parade of expert commentators pontificating upon important events — well, actually, who is to say they’re experts at all, that we should pay any attention to their perorations? Maybe they are all as divested of expertise as Mr Goma. It’s not journalism at all, really — just a cheap and mindless method of filling up airtime. People who know nothing interviewed badly by people who know even less.
Ah, there but for the grace of God. Journalism is a house of cards which is too rarely dismantled by the sudden intrusion of the wind of truth — by and large, we are all happy to continue building the edifice and are not always terribly scrupulous about it, no matter how highbrow and prestigious the newspaper or programme. Here’s an example.
Many years ago I was a youthful producer on BBC Radio Four’s World at One; it was a good time to be a journalist because the world was in joyous tumult with the end of the Cold War. I was extraordinarily proud of myself to have secured for my programme an interview with Georgi Arbatov, head of the Soviet Institute for American Studies and an adviser to every Soviet president from Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev. What a coup! As the Soviet Union dissolved and geopolitical relations were being turned on their head, I had tracked down and persuaded one of the five or six most crucial and significant people in the world to talk to us live on air, in the lead slot. It was a good interview, too. Georgi said he wanted better relations with the USA and was in favour of world peace and disarmament. ‘We must all now be frentz, yes?’ he asked at the end, with benevolent rhetoric. His broadcasted comments were duly written up in the following day’s broadsheet newspapers.
But as I discovered when I spoke to him after the interview, they were not the views of Georgi Arbatov, close adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, but the views of Georgi Arbatov, an insurance salesman from Minsk. Thank God, I mused later, reading the delighted reaction to his comments from Western politicians, that he was not a hawkish insurance salesman from Minsk: the missiles might have been leaving the silos.
This was a case of unwitting misrepresentation on my part, caused at least in part — once again — by language difficulties. Inexcusable, I suppose, but not on the same level of mendacity as a friend of mine who was trying to make a name for himself some years earlier on a regional newspaper. He had been dispatched to a far-flung district office of the paper, an area where interesting stories were in regrettably short supply. Dull tales of inconsequential misdemeanours from the magistrates’ courts, suffocatingly worthy charity drives from the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, the passing of harmless planning applications from the local council. So to alleviate the boredom he did this: he made up a whole town. An interesting town nearby, where things happened. Stocked with vibrant, colourful characters and the occasional grisly murder and provocative local politicians who wanted all the gypsies gassed and so on. He kept it up for a good year or more and nobody complained or questioned these wholly fictitious reports — perhaps because nobody really gave a monkey’s. Or maybe because in their hearts they preferred this town he had created to the rather monochrome, well-behaved settlements in which their real lives were unavoidably situated. Last I heard he was working for Associated Newspapers. Gives a new, post-modern meaning to that oft-sadly-exhaled postscript ‘You couldn’t make it up’. Well, he could. And did. And people liked it.
Deliberate misrepresentation is one thing — obviously avoidable and eminently punishable. But I wonder how much of our understanding of the world — and our reactions to what we hear via our televisions and radios or read in our newspapers — is based upon glorious misconception, a mistake on the part of some underling, or merely misinterpretation of nuance or tone or differences of language. During the first Gulf war I remember getting an English translation of an especially bloodthirsty speech by Saddam Hussein from the BBC’s monitoring service at Caversham. We then tracked down the original speech in Arabic and ran clips of it to illustrate the story. But, as ever, there had been some mix-up. It was actually the Arabic commentary to a golf tournament — as an Arab listener drily pointed out the following day. But even if we had run the correct clips, there would still have been a question about interpretation: the euphuism and hyperbole of Arab satraps is just that: hyperbole and euphuism. It is not meant to be taken literally. Even when we get things literally right, we can still get them wrong.
So thank you, Guy Goma and News 24, for reminding us of our infinite fallibilities and of the chasm between what is said and what is understood. We should treat everything we see, hear or read with measured scepticism — and when it emanates from people breathlessly described as experts, all the more so.
Offer ends in:
