The Rory Peck Trust: Award 1998

The 1998 Rory Peck Award Brochure

My year: in the studio

By Trevor McDonald, News at Ten, ITN

mcdonald.gif (10669 bytes) Once upon a time, there used to be a feeling in the news business that there was a season for the big stories and a season when they simply weren’t as big. That’s all changing and there’s never a time anymore when events worthy of the full attention of media slip entirely off the radar. The last year was a classic example.

I was fast asleep in bed one night last August when the telephone rang. Having abandoned an earlier version of my career as a journalist when I lived by and for the phone, I have come to regard late night calls with ill-concealed annoyance. I groped in the darkness to pick up the receiver. The voice at the other end informed me in a matter of fact way, that Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed had been killed in a car crash in Paris. Dumbfounded and overcome by a feeling that it couldn’t possibly be true, I slipped back under the sheets to compose myself, before going downstairs to listen to the radio and to watch the television in full flow.

The next weeks were probably the most intense of my professional life. I took a hotel room close to Grays Inn Road and for the next seven days I hardly left the studio. Still consumed by the shock and the incredulity of what had occurred, we were all conscious of what we had to do and how we should report it. Endless programmes were to be anchored before the day of her funeral. All life seemed suspended and the world appeared to be in a trance. The Royal Family at Balmoral hastily rewrote their plans; the Queen made an unprecedented live television broadcast. The sight of Diana’s sons, her brother, her former husband and the Duke of Edinburgh marching behind the coffin came, by the very nature of those images, to take possession of our minds.

Less than six months later came an event in Washington with consequences none of us could foretell. The news broke that President Clinton was having an affair with a White House trainee named Monica Lewinsky and this was to become the main focus of an investigation by an Independent Special Prosecutor who had been charged with looking into the catalogue of alleged Presidential misdemeanours. American news anchors and senior reporters had gone off to report on the Pope's visit to Cuba. Within twenty-four hours of the breaking news in Washington, they were back home.

What followed in the ensuing months broke all the records for political drama, and as I write is still doing so. None of us anticipated that the Independent Special Prosecutor would turn over Monica Lewinsky’s testimony and his report, running to thousands of pages, to Congress and that Congress would release it to the world. For weeks we’ve been treated to minute, intimate descriptions of everything Clinton and Lewinsky did. Reporting it came the closest we are ever likely to get to licensed, approved voyeurism. Suddenly we were plunged into a frenzied, zealous and almost pornographic invasion of one man’s privacy because he happened to be the President of the United States. What is certain is that publishing on the Internet what Clinton did between appointments with a young White House employee has re-marked the boundaries which have always protected at least some portion of our lives.

There were other more predictable events. President Saddam Hussein was again defying the international community by refusing to come clean about what he possesses in the way of weapons of mass destruction. There were more floods in Bangladesh. We were totally unprepared for the cold blooded murder of twenty nine people in a bomb blast in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh.

It was heart-rending to watch our colleagues reporting another famine in Sudan. It seemed to take us back to a darker age and to pose with more urgency the question of whether the international community is in fact so totally powerless to stop hundreds of thousands of people from starving to death before our cameras. It seemed odd at a time when we can send people to the moon and probes into the more distant reaches of outer space. Our profession is left with only one response. That is to make sure we tell the world what is happening. At least then, our leaders will never be able to claim that they never knew.

The Rory Peck Awards Brochure 1998