Media Monday: I Need a Hero

Just once I would like to see someone who's been involved in some sort of dramatic event--a battle, a hostage situation, a plane crash--say, "Yeah, I guess I am a hero." Would the newspaper headlines announce: "'I Am a Hero' Says Bus Plunge Saviour"?

We certainly see the polar opposite often enough. The latest person not to be a hero is Prince Harry, third in line to the British crown and just back from Afghanistan. The BBC reports that Harry thinks he's not a hero. The News of the World, on the other hand, insists that he is. So is "every British soldier fighting out in Afghanistan," says the NOTW. The Sun can't resist the alliterative possibility--nay, the duty--inherent in the prince's name. For the Sun, he will always by "Hero Harry."

Who else isn't a hero? There's Wesley Aubrey, the New York City man who last year jumped onto the subway track to pull a man from the path of an oncoming train. (“I’m still saying I’m not a hero ... 'cause I believe all New Yorkers should get into that type of mode,” said Aubrey.) Also not-a-hero is Ken Hammond, a Utah police officer who saved shoppers from a mall shooter. (He hedges his bets a bit, saying "I don't necessarily feel like a hero.") Nathan Oakshaw isn't a hero, even though the Welsh man dove into a freezing river in an unsuccessful bid to save a man from drowning. Thirteen-year-old Brittney Bohbot of Nebraska rescued her sisters from a fire, but she says she's not a hero, either. Neither is University of Hawaii professor Albert Britt Robillard. He's disabled and the mere act of being in a wheelchair has caused people to call him a hero. Which he says he's not.

All of these examples are arguably "heroic." And some of these people do seem to qualify. I mean, jumping in front of a train to save a person? That's hero-stuff. I think that Prince Harry is right to deny the hero label. It's just the idiotic media that feels compelled to ask that question: Do you feel like a hero? It's one more info-blip that we can slot into our stories. We know the answer before we even pose the question. The result, I think, is the wholesale degradation of the word "hero." The media applies it at the drop of a hat, only to see those it's applied to reject the label.

At a time when everyone's a hero, no one is.

Wild About Harry
Should the press have kept mum for the last 10 weeks? I'm inclined to think it was okay to abide by the terms of the embargo. The media wouldn't divulge operational details or publish information that would endanger any other specific person. Peter Wilby, in today's Guardian, disagrees. "To my mind, this was propaganda for a war of dubious legitimacy and declining public popularity," he writes.

The surprise is that the embargo lasted as long as it did.

The Peter Principle: I Make the Daily Mail

Being a columnist myself I understand the job's special requirements: the ability to feign outrage at the drop of a hat and the ability to churn out copy on deadline. I'm going to assume both things explain how a Daily Mail columnist came to mention me in that paper yesterday.

His name is Peter McKay and he visited the Reuters Fellows last month. Yesterday's column isn't online, so I'll quote the pertinent item in its entirety:
"Speaking to a group of foreign journalists at the Reuters' Institute in Oxford, I told the story of covering many years ago the homecoming of a 'lost' trawler in Aberdeen. A big story because everyone thought the crew had perished but, badly damaged, the boat had taken shelter until a North Sea storm died down. Then sailed home without knowing there had been a fuss about them. I said we'd asked the skipper to take the boat out of the harbour and sail it back in so that we could get good 'Ghost ship sails in' pictures instead of boring shots of it tied up. Being an idealistic young lad, I told my audience, I wondered if this artifice was ethical and decided it was. But a Washington Post journalist on the course said his paper would never countenance such a deception. The pompous idiots do, however, publish mock-up pictures every day of President George W. Bush 'in conversation' or 'sharing a joke' with distinguished visitors."

I'll get to that last sentence in just a bit, but first let's focus on the rest of the paragraph. McKay did indeed tell that story. But, according to my notes, he left some details out. McKay said he and the more senior Daily Express reporter he was working with paid the skipper to sail back. They'd missed the actual return and wanted a photograph that could be described as the ship making landfall for the first time. Having missed reality the first time around, they decided to manufacture it.

"Most news has been devised," McKay said. He explained that the structure of a story has been decided ahead of time and the journalist then sets out to assemble the elements that make the finished product possible.

McKay seemed reluctant to entertain the notion that journalism has an obligation to be anything other than entertaining. "Newspapering is a business," he said. It's "absolutely wrong," he said, to think that newspapers have any sort of duty to society.

Well, fine. At least you know where Peter McKay stands. Somewhere in the 1950s, but there you are. Now let's deconstruct that last sentence: "The pompous idiots do, however, publish mock-up pictures every day of President George W. Bush 'in conversation' or 'sharing a joke' with distinguished visitors." Pompous idiots? I don't think I was especially pompous or idiotic that afternoon. In fact I had just complimented--well, not complimented exactly, more remarked upon--the Daily Mail's hard-hitting coverage of women's breasts. I stand in awe of it. (From yesterday's Mail: "Christina Aguilera looks bustier than ever." Something to do with lactating, apparently.)

Next, does The Post publish "mock-up pictures"? Um, I don't think so, but to be sure I asked the Post's assistant managing editor for photography, Michel DuCille, if we did. Of course not, the Pulitzer Prize-winner said in an e-mail.

And would a Post photographer do as the inventive McKay did years ago: incent an Aberdeen fisherman to putt-putt around a harbor for the benefit of a photographer looking for his money shot? "We absolutely would never do that," DuCille wrote. "If we can't capture the real thing we don't recreate it. It is simply not the truth. Photojournalism must speak the truth."

DuCille sent along the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics. One part reads: "While photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events." Sounds pretty straightforward to me.

Frankly, I can't quite understand what McKay is referring to. The Post doesn't do anything "every day" except print the weather forecast. Faked or PhotoShopped pictures of George Bush? Every day? Sharing a joke with distinguished visitors? McKay has something in mind but I can't for the life of me tell what it is. I don't think he can, either. When I e-mailed asking him, basically, WTF?, he responded with: "I am researching the WP's mock-up pictures situation." Let me know what you find out, Peter.

The thing is, I agree with some of what McKay said that afternoon, comments that were only occasionally punctuated by the tiresome "I long for the good old days" nostalgia that afflicts so many journalists. For example, he said: "If the public are interested, it's in the public's interest." This was by way of defending the Mail's take-no-prisoners approach to just about everything it covers. Which makes McKay's admission that the Mail has been sitting for months on a story involving the royal family very odd. There's some scandal, apparently, involving a minor royal. But McKay said the palace requested the paper sit on it and the Mail complied.

You'd think he would be right on it, with a camera in one hand and a wad of cash in the other.

The Money Shot
Here's the point in this post where I have to get all serious for a moment. I do not agree with McKay that most newspaper stories are decided ahead of time then assembled in IdentaKit fashion. Of course, I can only speak for The Washington Post. The best stories--the best columns, even--are the result of following the reporting where it takes you.

I won't even speculate if the unease and distrust many consumers feel for the media these days stems from the feeling that all journalists subscribe to the McKay model: loose with the facts in pursuit of a "better" story. The thing is, I'm not sure even he agrees with that. I suspect that deep down in his leathery Fleet Street heart McKay thinks that I'm right, which is why as a cub reporter he questioned his actions on that quay and why, a full month after we spoke, our little exchange still rankles. Or does that sound a bit pompous?

Go West Young Man

I've never had much of a problem driving in the U.K. Oh sure, there's been the occasional near head-on collision, but the thing to remember is, they've been near head-on collisions. No harm, no foul, I say.

We rented a car for last week's jaunt to the West Country and driving was almost second nature. I credit the two months I've spent riding a bike on the "wrong" side of the road. It makes roundabouts and slip roads a piece of cake. And My Lovely Wife is a wonderful navigatrix. She always knew where we were, even when we were lost.

But being able to drive on the left is not the same as being able to painlessly get to our desired destinations. I probably wasted $50 in gas from overshooting our turnoff and having to drive for miles on narrow, twisty, hedgerow-crowded lanes before finding a place where I could turn around. Still, I never panicked, even when I encountered another car coming in the opposite direction on a road barely big enough for one vehicle, let alone two. (I was quite proud that when I returned the rental car this morning there was a bit of Cornwall hedge stuck in the passenger-side rear-view mirror. I wouldn't have been surprised to find a hedgehog in the wheel well.)

Where did we go? Well our first stop was a little town called Bradford on Avon and we stopped there for one reason only: I wanted to ask how many tourists show up hoping to see William Shakespeare's birthplace.

"About two or three a year," said the head of the tourist information office.

"Or they ask what's on at the theater," said a volunteer in the office, Joan Reeve. Joan told me they're happy to pass on directions to Stratford-upon-Avon, which is about 100 miles away and on a totally different River Avon. ("Avon" is a Saxon word that means "river." There are three River Avons--or "River Rivers"--in England.)

My curiousity sated, we drove on to a little village called Dinder, where we stayed two nights in a bed-and-breakfast called Middle Farm:


It was lovely, run by a retired school teacher and his artist wife. The house was filled with art. I was struck by this photo over the toilet:




It's of an Aboriginal Madonna and child from a cathedral in Darwin, Australia. The Christ child kept reminding me of someone. Take another look:



Tell me he doesn't look like Richard Nixon.

We took a day trip to Bath, where we toured the Roman spa and swam in waters fed from the very springs the ancients did. It was a place called the Thermae Bath Spa, open for just a year. There are four levels to the spa, several scented steam rooms (not as gross as that sounds), massage and mud-wrapping rooms, and two pools, including a rooftop pool that's open to the elements. It was wonderful. You emerge from the elevator shivering in your bathing suit then plunge into the steamy pool and float blissfully, your skin pruning up. All around you are various Georgian buildings, church spires and the like--what my youngest daughter called "random historical crap." She meant that in a good way.

We had lunch in the posh Pump Room restaurant where a uniformed waiter stood behind a sign that read: "Why not try the famous spa water? 50p a glass."

Why not? Allow My Lovely Wife to answer that:


Frankly, the spa waters are better for swimming in than drinking.

The next day we hiked Glastonbury Tor (see Friday's post) and headed further west, to Tintagel, King Arthur country. Ruth and I had been there before, on our honeymoon 20 years ago. It's a striking, windswept place, craggy cliffs that reach out the sea. Was King Arthur born there? Probably not, but it's fun to think so. And the town of Tintagel has certainly capitalized on its association with the King of the Britons. Every other souvenir and tea shop is "King Arthur This" or "Merlin That." Twenty years ago I took a photo of a trash can full of plastic "Excaliburs" for sale outside a tacky shop. I think the swords were selling for 60 pence. It didn't take me long to find the shop again:


The price of everything has gone up.

Royal Treatment
The price of blackmail, for example. Imagine my surprise at yesterday's Sunday Times story on a member of the royal family targeted in a 50,000-pound sex and drugs blackmail plot. Unseemly. (But not unprecedented. Here's a history of royal blackmail.)

The papers today assure us that it is not a "senior royal" who is involved. They don't explain what that means. Does it mean it's not an elderly royal? Or not one of the ones we all would recognize--even Americans? Is there a list somewhere of who's senior and who's junior? Is there a lesser crested royal?

I can't wait to learn the juicy details. And I won't feel guilty. In his book "What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics," British journalist and gadfly John Lloyd has this to say about coverage of the royal family:

“Their private life has to be an issue issue of public concern because one of the fruits of royalty’s loins will become the British head of state. And thus the royal loins are a legitimate area of interest.”

A slab of royal loin will be served soon, I'm sure.