MEDIA STUDIES

What it's like for a reporter to be there when news happens, not afterwards

NICHOLAS OWEN

There have been a few exceptions in the more than 30 years of my career: an explo- sion behind some houses which interrupted my (always inexpert) coverage of local foot- ball when I was on a weekly newspaper; a bomb which nearly blew me out of a Belfast hotel room; seeing a man jump up and fire what turned out to be blanks at the Prince of Wales in Australia. Heart-stopping moments, but nothing like this week's expe- rience. To be a witness to disaster means dealing with a range of emotions and feel- ings anyone finds complex. For a reporter, questions about personal actions and reac- tions crowd in.

In the historical context, 'my' disaster was small. A Catalina flying boat, built around the time I was born, in the mid-1940s, touched down in the Solent off Southamp- ton, veered sharply left, and within a minute began to sink. A friend and I had watched from a long pier across Southamp- ton Water as this ungainly but impressive machine had made a couple of lazy passes before the final landing.

It was not on the scale of that famous air- ship disaster in the 1930s, caught on film as it cascaded down in flames. What we remember more than the pictures, I think, is the live commentary: the reporter saying, if memory serves right, 'Oh God' and 'The suffering humanity.'

The media are often accused of acting badly on such occasions, ignoring the ago- nies of survivors and witnesses in an attempt to get the story and often reporting the authorities' pleas for people to 'stay away' and not to gawp while at the same time rushing to the site of the excitement.

I was on holiday — as I was when the other major story of my life broke, the acci- dent which befell the Princess of Wales in Paris. This time, there I stood on an old Victorian pier and watched the events unfold which would make the headlines, both for my own employers, ITN, and for every daily newspaper.

This being the late 1990s, I had my mobile phone with me. Before I had a chance to use it, a youngish lad with a cam- era round his neck ran from the head of the pier past me towards the land. 'My mother was on that plane!' he gasped out. He looked stricken. I felt stricken. 'I'm sure they'll be all right,' I said. Daft reassurance, really. How could I possibly know?

The swerve after the initial touchdown seemed simply like an inefficient landing. It was a minute later, when the Catalina's bul- bous nose began to sink and the tail came up, that something like full realisation plodded into the brain. There would be people in that fuselage. It would be desper- ately hard to get out. Sixteen people, including the crew, somehow did.

Two people did not make it, dying a few hundred yards from my Victorian pier van- tage-point in the wonderfully warm, late July sunshine. Of course, I could not know from standing on the pier, or from hurried conversations with my own office, whether there had been casualties. A knot of people gathered around me. We all gazed.

The mood was light-hearted. 'Such a sad sight on a such a nice day' . . Did you actually see it?' . . . 'I always wonder about flying boats. . . . ' Only gradually did one or two come up quietly, seeing me on the phone, to ask, Did everyone get out?' No one used the words, 'Did anyone die?' We all must have wondered. Everyone became very friendly, and to this journalist very 4YVERP4r4ENT-APPFt611/t0 helpful too: the man who passed on what he had heard on the local maritime radio, the driver who made a special return trip with his train on the pier railway to trans- port personnel and camera gear.

I can report that you do not believe your own eyes for many minutes. There is no pounding heart. There is a calm and there is, thankfully, a denial running through the mind. Surely they are all right. That boat which rushed to the stricken plane . . . isn't she going away again? That rescue heli- copter was circling, now it has flown off. That must mean all is somehow fine.

And, yes, a stony professionalism seeps in. A regional ITV camera crew turned up, and it was my turn to answer, rather than ask, questions. An old ITN colleague has retired to the little town with the Victorian pier. He lent a boat and we went out to film close up.

Most curious of all, though, was my own worry that my account of the crash, carried on ITV news bulletins and some newspa- pers, might have been faulty. So often eye- witnesses' versions of events differ wildly. A car accident in a Paris tunnel last August emphasised that. So there was a peculiar sense of relief when another eye-witness I interviewed gave the same particulars in the same order. His impressions of the time that elapsed between incidents tallied with mine.

Political journalists are on hand fre- quently to see and hear great stories hap- pen. Court reporters see murderers sen- tenced. Except during wars, it is rare for the media to be among the original rather than the secondary sources when it comes to vio- lent death. My BBC friend Michael Buerk did it memorably in South Africa. My for- mer ITN colleague Ann Perkins did it when a Protestant extremist chucked bombs in Milltown cemetery.

And of course that American correspon- dent in the 1930s shared his nightmare so vividly. The old Soviet Union suppressed news of tragedy. In democracies few would argue against the principle that we should be told and that witnesses, be they journal- ists or not, should tell their stories. You come home shocked, saddened — and grateful in a most uncomplicated way for the gift of being alive.

Nicholas Owen is a presenter and correspon- dent for ITN.