← From Our Own Correspondent
From Our Own Correspondent
Please Mick. Not boring ..
00:27:59
The correspondent's trade: memories of the late Ian McDougall who filed for the BBC in...
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This is a download from the BBC. It's from our own correspondent. We make one version of the program for the BBC World Service, but this is the latest edition broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
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It's introduced by Kate Ad.
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Hello. Today, what's in a scoop? We hear from the correspondent who maintained there was no merit at all in being first if your story was a load of old rubbish. Another reporter is accused of being a British imperialist and of being boring. We're in the home of country music asking if Americans really can contemplate going back to work on the factory floor. And in Ethiopia, where there's a surprising show of affection at the dinner table. North Korea has reacted angrily to a conference which took place in Washington on Tuesday which listed what were termed widespread human rights abuses. The regime in Pyongyang has repeatedly said America uses the human rights issue as a pretext to overthrow it. Recently it suggested the US look instead at what it calls the CIA's torture crimes. The State Department point out the event was privately organized and nothing to do with them. But this latest controversy comes in the run up to a traditionally tense time of year in relations on the Korean Peninsula. At the end of February and beginning of March, about 200,000 South Korean and American troops hold huge manoeuvres involving air, sea and land forces. Steve Evans is in Seoul where he says a debate's underway about the most effective way of dealing with threats from the North.
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It's not often that I get called a British imperialist by people holding a press conference. It's not the way I think of myself.
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I.
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And it's not usual for the subject of a news event to turn on one of the reporters at that news event. But it did happen the other day. A group of activists from a human rights organization based in New York came to Seoul to talk about their plans for sending tens of thousands of copies of the movie the Interview on USB sticks into North Korea. The men from the American group wore dark glasses and strode to the cameras. And like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, there was a grand speech about freedom, which is fine, but I thought it might be good to ask whether it was the proper place of Americans to come to South Korea and make such provocative gestures at a time of great tension. Who, I also wondered, funded their organization? Had the CIA put any money in the place? Erupted. The main speaker detected my accent and asked me if I was from the imperialist nation of Britain. The questions, I was told, were unprofessional. It made me realize how perceptions of North Korea in the United States are often different from perceptions in South Korea, where I live and work. Many South Koreans have no doubt of the viciousness of the regime in Pyongyang. In the last five years, a South Korean military ship has been sunk, the south says, by a northern torpedo. Troops from both sides were killed in a clash at Yeonpyeong island, off the coast of the peninsula. The repression of the regime in Pyongyang was documented in a UN report which cited murder, rape, and starvation of prisoners. I speak often to a man who was imprisoned in North Korea and who will bear the trauma of what he calls torture until the day he dies. Indeed, he often tells me he's on the verge of suicide. South Koreans know the evils of the north, but they also know that they share a peninsula, a history and common blood with those there. And they're in the firing line. So they weigh their protest carefully. Good, perhaps, to send propaganda, but not good to provoke a war. Those most insistent on provocation are often defectors, some of whom believe with good cause that they're the targets of North Korean hitmen. But defectors are not always to be trusted. As one Korean told me, they have an interest in selling their stories strong. Many find it hard to get work and and come to rely on support groups for defectors. And these groups in turn, are sometimes reliant on outside money. Defectors write memoirs, and to sell them, the books need to be a strong read. In recent days, one prominent escapee from the north has admitted that crucial facts in his published account were untrue. Shin Dong Hyuk has campaigned prominently to highlight abuses in the north, testifying before the United Nations Commission. But he's now apologized on Facebook after overstating the suffering. It all shows the difficulty of assessing the testimony of those who escape. And it should also be said of those Westerners who go to North Korea heavily supervised, but who return with a rose tinted view. Ideology intrudes and complexity goes out of the window. I think that's why the activists from the American human rights group didn't like my awkward questions. But as I told them after, robust skepticism is what democracy is all about. It's in the best tradition of British journalism, imperial or not. By the way, I've been called worse things than a British imperialist by those holding press conferences in a spirit of mischief. I once had the impertinence to ask Mick Jagger about the completely legal tax arrangements of the Rolling Stones. He replied in front of a New York plaza full of adoring hacks that I was from the Boring Broadcasting Corporation. Now that hurt. Particularly since I've spent a lifetime saying the Stones are better even than the Beatles. Mick. Mick, not boring. Please Mick. Not boring.
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The far from boring. Steve Evans in the South Korean capital Seoul. Now is the US economy really on the way back? There's no doubt unemployment has tumbled. 3 million new jobs were created last year and the collapse in oil prices has put more money in consumers pockets. So Americans are spending more, but only on some things. New cars are speeding out of the showrooms. There's more eating out. But in many shops, clothing, home furnishings, electronics there's little sign of the eagerly awaited recovery. American manufacturing does seem to be undergoing something of a renaissance. Nearly 800,000 new jobs have been created in recent years. This reverses a decade long trend where the industry lost a staggering one third of its workers. Linda Yu has been to Tennessee to find out what's behind this apparent return to the factory floor.
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The song let's Give Them Something to Talk About Wasps through the air When I walk down Broadway in downtown Nashville, sign after sign and neon lights announce the names of the bars and restaurants that line both sides of the street, most of them with their own live country music bands playing to crowded rooms full of diners chowing down on southern barbecue. But that's not why President Obama came to Tennessee last month, or why I was here. No, it was to see how Tennessee was leading the revival of manufacturing in America. The home of country music is now surprisingly being called the new Detroit. The largest car factory in North America owned by Japanese firm Nissan, is located here and not in Michigan. Factories like the Nissan one are hiring and expanding, but those of today are nothing like the shop floors of the past. Robotic arms not only assemble the cars, but robots drive supplies around the factory floor. That is an astounding 5.3 million square feet. I was driven around in a golf cart. Since it was a mile from the factory entrance to the stamping machine churning out car bonnets, Nissan recently decided to cite more of its car production in the US and it's not just foreign companies. After decades when production was leaving the U.S. american firms like Stanley, Black and Decker, which have been manufacturing in countries like China, are returning. They recently produced their first power tool in the US in over 25 years. An almost perfect storm of factors is boosting American manufacturing. The shale revolution has lowered energy costs and made the US look competitive again. Rising wages in emerging markets like China are another reason Black Decker says it now costs no more to produce in America. Than it does in China once logistics and transport are taken into account. Plus, the US has maintained its position as the technology leader, so productivity is high. The president announced federal money to support advanced industry, those with a high proportion of research and development spending and stem. That's science, technology, engineering and mathematics workers. The funding for Oak Ridge National Laboratory supports the development of 3D printing, or what's called additive manufacturing. The husk of a 3D printed car sits next to a machine that doesn't look much like a printer. A robotic arm secretes layer upon layer of plastic to form a section of a car body. I then visited the company working with Oak Ridge to create the materials that make the car body strong enough to withstand road stress. The smell of melting plastic and the loud whirling of machines reminded me that even though the products are high tech, it's still a manufacturing plant. But will Americans really contemplate going back to work on the factory floor? The company's all worried about a shortage of skilled workers. So I went to meet students from the University of Tennessee. They told me they didn't see their future in manufacturing. Some wanted to finance those plants, while others said they weren't good enough at mathematics to work in advanced industries. But they all agreed that that manufacturing has an image problem. It might have been a good job for their parents generation, but it was not for them. America wants to produce more after a devastating financial crisis and also address the issue of wages that have been stagnant for decades. So advanced manufacturing could help. But will this revival last? And can it? If manufacturing is no longer part of the American dream? Walking along the neon lit streets of Nashville, the quest for stardom has brought many hopefuls to the town that launched musicians and singers like Taylor Swift. But in Oak Ridge National Lab, a hundred students gathered after school to chase a different dream. They were competing to build the best robot. One of them put up a sign that said Made in America, but in Chinese. It's their way of signaling that the Made in China labels in English on their clothes and electronics will soon face some serious competition.
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And that's Linda Yu. Now some have speculated that the devastating attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office and the Jewish supermarket in Paris reflect a growing disenchantment with the French way of life. There have been scores of reports of a supposed breakdown in social cohesion in the banlieue on some of the city's rundown and bleak housing states. And yet it seems there are many immigrants only too keen still to embrace the values of liberty. Egalite and fraternity. Chris Bockman in the southern city of Toulouse has just been to what's called a naturalisation ceremony, where immigrants from a number of different countries were told it was important to integrate fully into French life in France.
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Prefects are modern day regional governors and are the eyes and ears of the state outside Paris. They live and work in grand gates, mansions with huge manicured gardens and city centers with permanent police protection. Not many people get a chance to penetrate these secretive fortresses, apart from local grandees and politicians. The journalists they may allow in for special events. But once a month, the gates open wide for a group of people who in some cases had once faced deportation. And this was a very special day. For 144 men and women from 42 different countries, this was the day their long dream of obtaining French nationality officially became reality. In ordinary circumstances, a ceremony like this would anyway be an emotional moment for these new French citizens. But on this occasion there was an added poignancy. It was the first naturalization process here since the terror attacks in Paris in January, and I was invited along by the prefect Pascal Maillot to see it happen. Algerians and Moroccans made up the largest proportion of the group. Some of the women wore short skirts, others headscarves. The men had dressed smartly. All had come with cameras. Young children, oblivious to protocol, chased each other under the grand chandelier. Some of these new French citizens had spent years battling for a French passport. For others, it was a far simpler process. Many, like 28 year old Leila, had come over from Morocco as an engineering student and then found work in the aerospace industry. One couple were long term political refugees from Iran. Others had come on holiday or short term work contracts, fallen in love and married French locals. They were able to stay once they'd acquired residency papers, but at that point had nothing. That said officially they were anything but temporary visitors. The ceremony started with a short video highlighting the history of France and how it had become a republic. The prefect then took to the stage and talked about the attacks that happened in Paris in January. He said it was up to them to show they could integrate into French life. Then, in a rather bold move for an elite French civil servant, he reminded his audience of John F. Kennedy's famous line, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Every one of the French citizens to be had been handed a sheet of paper with the lyrics to La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. And an honor guard of military veterans with flags in hand led the singing. Then there was spontaneous applause and the first tears began to flow. Within the next 50 minutes, 144 people became French citizens. Each one was called up to the front and greeted with a handshake from the prefect. He gave them a brochure that contained the official documents confirming they were French. There was a copy of the French constitution and another document spelling out their rights and obligations under French law. Many of the new citizens had been accompanied to the ceremony by local mayors, councillors, even the odd MP who, knowing how the system worked, had battled France's overwhelming bureaucracy to help their constituents overcome the hurdles along the path to citizenship. To get there, all these candidates had to know how to speak French, possess no criminal record and provide proof of financial independence. They also had to show they were committed to assimilating into French life. Later, Prefect Maillot, who, by the way, once ran the equivalent of MI5, the French domestic intelligence service, told me that after the attacks in Paris, it was more important than ever for the new citizens to show their willingness to belong, to live together and and to become part of French society. He used the word fraternity several times. One of the new French citizens, Bashif, an Algerian born truck driver, said that had become even harder for him in recent weeks as the attacks in Paris had thrown suspicion on his Muslim faith. Another, a Moroccan woman, said she didn't even want to think about what happened during that terrible week in January, especially on a day like this. After the last new citizen had been applauded, everyone moved next door for a brief reception. The whole ceremony had taken less than two hours as the final guests filed through the prefecture gates towards the bustling, snarled up medieval streets to begin their new lives. The population of French citizens had just grown by 144.
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Chris Bachmann in Toulouse. These days, it seems there's one humanitarian crisis after another in in Ukraine, Syria, South Sudan and the countries hit by Ebola. Thirty years ago, there was one disaster above all capturing the attention of the world. The famine in Ethiopia, which led to the deaths of up to a million people. Today, Ethiopia is still one of the poorest countries in the world. But lessons have been learned. There have been significant developments. People have more money, there's more irrigation, farming, more industry. The nation's gradually opening up to international business. But as James Hassam has been finding out, when you sit down to eat with friends there, you need to keep your wits about you.
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It's easy to get hooked on Ethiopian food. It's delicious, healthy and nutritious. The staple dish is called injera, looking like a big spongy pancake. This is the heart of any shared Ethiopian meal. One injera is laid out on a big plate, a variety of meat and vegetable dishes are poured onto it, and everybody digs in with their hands. There's one rather charming tradition that I'll admit to finding slightly disconcerting. The first time I encountered it, I was eating injera with a few good friends in a traditional restaurant. The local beer was flowing and we were having a great time. I took a swig of my drink and as I put the bottle back on the table, my friend Simacho reached down, tore off a piece of injera and scooped up some shiro, a popular dish made from chickpeas. What happened next is something I won't forget for a long time. Simacho put his left hand on my shoulder and with a big grin on his face, brought his right hand up to my mouth and fed me. Cue uproarious laughter and back slapping from everyone else at the table. I did my best to look relaxed and laugh along, but I'll be honest, I struggle to see the funny side. I'm no prude, but I haven't been fed by anyone since I was wearing a Biblical. I later asked Simacho what this was all about, and amid more laughter aimed at my obvious discomfort about the whole thing, he it turns out this tradition called gersha, literally feeding another is the ultimate expression of friendship. It signifies that a person is welcome and has been accepted. It's also about sharing food, not something everyone in Ethiopia can take for granted. Millions of people live in poverty, and the country is one of the world's biggest recipients of foreign aid. That said, it's come a long way from those iconic 1980s images of starving children that prompted the Live Aid concerts watched by millions. Back then, food was scarce and famine was common. Sharing your lunch was not an option. These days, while Ethiopia remains very poor, things are different. Economic growth is among the fastest in the world, and a small middle class is emerging. And the country has natural resources of which it's rightly proud. Ethiopian coffee is world famous, but it doesn't end there. For an estimated 4,000 years, Ethiopia has been one of only a few countries in the world to grow teff successfully. This tiny grain is the staple in the Ethiopian diet, where it's ground into flour, mixed with water and fermented and made into injera. Rich in iron and gluten free, it's becoming popular in Europe and North America, where it's seen as a healthy alternative to wheat. But in 2006, Ethiopia's government banned the export of raw teff. Once it's made into injera bread or any of a number of other teff based products, it can be exported, but the raw grain cannot cross the country's borders. The government took this decision, it says, to protect teff consumers in the country from price rises. The thinking being that once international sales took off, the demand for teff would go up and so would the price. So at the moment, the raw teff stays put and the country earns only a small amount from exports of injera and other teff products. There is a sense among some people rarely expressed in a country where free speech is a luxury, not a right of untapped potential. Farmers are reliant on wooden ploughs, grain is processed largely by hand, and most people outside the big cities travel in carts pulled by horses. Ethiopia earns hundreds of millions of dollars every year from coffee exports, and many feel teff could earn the country even more. But exports and politics aside, Ethiopian food is a source of pride and passion for its people. Injera is part of their cultural identity and often eaten for lunch and dinner, the leftovers from last night's meal are routinely made into the next morning's breakfast. At lunch recently with an Ethiopian colleague, the waiter brought bread to the table alongside the injera. I watched with amazement as my normally mild mannered companion tore a strip off the poor chap, asking incredulously what he was playing at. To her, like most of her countrymen and women, the idea of eating anything but injera, at least with lunch, is baffling. So next time you get the chance to try some traditional Ethiopian food, I can highly recommend it. Just don't be surprised if your dining partner takes it upon himself or herself to make sure you're full.
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And that's James Hassam. The funeral of the former BBC correspondent Ian McDougal took place in Sussex this week. He joined the corporation in 1948 after serving in the Intelligence Corps and seeing active service in Italy. A year later, at the age of 28, he became the youngest foreign correspondent the BBC had ever appointed. When he was posted to the Paris office. He went on to file for the BBC from more than 40 countries. And in August 1976, this program asked him to reveal some of the secrets of the correspondence trade.
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The reason why a broadcasting correspondent has an easier time now than he did in the 40s is simple. It is that communications have improved. Communications are the only things that change in news. The news itself, despite what some may claim about there being more of it today or less of it, remains remarkably the same from one decade to the next. And in fact, the only really novel events that have happened in my time are space travel, political hijackings, mass tourism, and the plastic explosion in household equipment, what one advertising man once described to me as the breakthrough in plastic toys for budgerigars. When I first started in the 40s as number two in the Paris office, we had to send nearly all our stories at fixed times over a microphone hookup, a music circuit, as it's called in the trade, and only occasionally did we use the phone, because at that time, for various tedious reasons, the use of the phone for broadcasting was forbidden. Stories were always breaking much earlier or later than circuit time, and again and again we had to make do with sending part of a story, whereas a report by phone would have hit the nail on the head at exactly the moment we wanted. Tom Cadet, the chief Paris correspondent at that time, and myself used to scamper up and down a flight of stairs to a converted attic bedroom in a hotel and seclude ourselves behind a thick curtain as if in a confessional, screaming ourselves hoarse until contact was established with London and praying that we'd emerge without dying from suffocation. It was, incidentally, the only broadcasting studio in the whole world equipped with a bidet. In that, as in so much else, the BBC led the field. As time went by, the telephone was rehabilitated as a legitimate means of sending dispatches by voice, and the extension of the automatic system for international calls greatly reduced the need to maintain bad tempered arguments with exchange operators in various languages. I once got through to London in a few seconds from a jungle telephone on the frontier between Malaya and Thailand, which was having its cord chewed by a sacred goat as I used it. And in the remotest part of the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, I was taken by a heavily armed escort to a railway signals box half a mile away in the middle of the night. We'd been sleeping in a train while accompanying the then Soviet leader Khrushchev in order to receive a call from the BBC. I thought this was good staff work on the part of the Romanian post office, and I thanked my escort, who, however stolidly, informed me that they had only been protecting me from the packs of mountain bears which infested the region. I then understood for the first time why they'd made me change from my light colored pajamas into something dark, a disconcerting instruction at four in the morning in a communist country. However, while Improved phone systems, not to mention cable and telex and satellite, have made human contacts much faster. They've also reduced the frequency of the old fashioned scoop, by which I mean a story which no one else has got and which, and this is the crucial point, which is worth having. There's no merit at all in being first with a load of boring old rubbish. I am proud that the profession of foreign correspondence survives. Democracy needs it. Even though some people claim to be vague about what foreign correspondents do and whether indeed they do anything at all. There is a lunatic fringe which thinks they drink champagne out of their mistress's shoes and live at the local Ritz. There is another fringe, not entirely lunatic, but almost so, which believes they're on Christian name terms with everyone in their territory from the present downwards and are occasionally called in to advise on foreign policy. When all is said and done, however, it also seems to me a profession which teaches you to cope with literally any situation without flapping and without yielding to the pressures of interested parties over a very long time and on a day to day basis. This is harder than it sounds. It defines too the frontiers of your powers of endurance and rubs in the valuable lesson that the way things appear on the spot are nearly always different from the way they are visualized by the reader or listener in an armchair. This has nothing to do with inaccurate reporting. It has to do with the human imagination which seems unable to cope with anything smaller than twice life size. I don't remember being seriously frightened on a story I was actually covering, but I was often terrified when I read other people's reports of it afterwards.
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The late Ian MacDougall, 27 years abroad, 10,000 news stories and a veteran of the only broadcasting studio in the world equipped with a B day. That's it. More from correspondents around the world on Saturday Morning. I hope you'll join us. Goodbye.