Lies, Damn Lies, and Network News
Or how I was initiated
UPDATE 07OCT24: I know how he feels. Photojournalist self-immolates in front of the White House over media misinformation.
UPDATE 09OCT24: CBS “60 Minutes” gets called out for deceptive editing. Nothing has changed in 45 years.
In the summer of 1980, I was a naive 19-year-old on a mission to backpack around the world. To achieve my goal, I had to pick up odd jobs and gigs along the way, since wiring money from home was a slow, expensive and laborious task.
I had gotten a job crewing on a sailing yacht from Amsterdam to Monaco for the season, which paid and fed well. I later found myself in Corfu, caddying for wealthy Greeks and crewing on the Bond film For Your Eyes Only. This gave me enough money to achieve one of my primary goals of visiting the pyramids at Giza.
While staying in Cairo, I frequented Shepheard’s Hotel, with one of the most famous bars in all of Africa. It was a combination of every stereotypical writer’s bar in every film noir ever — hot, dusty, smoky, and packed with foreign journalists and correspondents from around the world, drinking gin tonics and grousing about the latest assignment.
My hostel didn’t have fans, but Shepheard’s bar did, so I spent many afternoons escaping the clambake outside, reading and listening to tales of war and peace.
One afternoon, the correspondent from NBC Cairo was complaining about being sent to Johannesburg to cover the race riots. He looked at me, appraising my physical constitution, which was pretty buff back then. He called me over, slid a case out from under the table and asked me if I knew how to use a camera. I opened the case to find an Éclair NPR reflex self-blimped synch sound 16mm rig, with an Angénieux 12-120mm f/2.2 variable focal-length lens. It was beat up, but to my eyes looked like a stack of gold bars.
Looking through the viewfinder, I checked the front and back focus, then connected the cable from the battery belt and mounted the Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic, checking the audio levels. I then shouldered the camera and looked at the correspondent.
A round of chuckles went around the table. “He’s your man, Mike,” one gravelly voice said through a cloud of blue smoke, backlit by a shaft of afternoon Cairo light.
Within the hour, I was at the NBC office, enjoying the first A/C I had felt in months, while the logistics guy processed my travel and press papers. At the same time, the correspondent was briefing me on the assignment, most of which I never heard. My heart was doing sommersaults, my mind was doing cartwheels, and I had the distinct and inescable feeling that I was somehow pulling off a grift. Certainly, the pay package had more numbers than I had ever seen, and that only made me more nervous.
At an ungodly hour the next morning, I arrived at the office to pick up the camera and several spools of film. I secured my backpack in the office storeroom, bringing only the bare necessities in my day pack, then I lugged the whole mess out to the waiting car. We sped off to the airport in the cool dawn light as the Adhan went up from every mosque in the city.
Ten hours later, I found myself in the Carlton Hotel bar, in much the same environment I had left in Cairo, except it was the dead of winter, which I hadn’t planned on.
We sat for four days in the Carlton bar, waiting for an assignment, while drinkng copious amounts of gin and playing bridge and canasta. The call finally came mid-morning, and the bar emptied out into a fleet of waiting Land Rovers We drove for a couple of hours into the remotest parts of Transvaal. The entire trip, I was wrestling with the camera gear, checking and rechecking every detail, while crammed up against the door with two other cameramen trying to do the same thing.
The fleet ground to a halt in a cloud of red dust in the middle of a group of mud brick huts. In front of us, two black families were yelling, and throwing sticks and rocks at each other. On cue, we looked at each other for a beat, then baled out of the cars and started rolling on the scene, while the correspondents were running in circles with their translators, trying to get the story and set up interviews.
Several large sticks barely missed me, as I ran from position to position, getting as many angles as I could, without getting the other cameramen or reporters in the shots. We all shot through the first spool at about the same time and scrambled back to the car to change reels.
I didn’t have a daylight spool, so I had to use a dark bag to unload the exposed film and load new stock. This proved to be a major task, with my heart pounding, a veritable flood of adrenalin in my blood, and my correspondent screaming at me to get this or that shot.
When the excitement had died down, I was lying in an exhausted heap with the other cameramen, while the correspondents wrapped up. We all glanced at each other, wondering what the hell we had just seen, but no one said a word. As it turned out, the two black families were fighting over a stolen chicken.
Back in Johannesburg, I sat in the film lab nursing an adrenaline hangover and wondering what the hell I was doing here. When the film was developed, I carried the three 10-minute reels to the satellite ground station.
While I was loading the film onto a telecine to upload the footage to New York, the correspondent showed up to view the footage. When it had all been uploaded, he clapped me on the back and congratulated me on a fine bit of work.
The next morning, we were gathered at the bar with three grizzled and barely functioning TeeVee sets tuned to different networks. When NBC Nightly News came on, I sat bolt upright, wondering if they were going to use my footage, and how they would frame this story. The correspondent’s face came on, telling of racial unrest and the evils of Apartheid, cutting to my B-roll of flying rocks and sticks, and angry black faces.
The editing was artfully done. There were establishing shots of police in riot gear advancing toward the camera in wide and medium shots. Cut to angry black faces and rock throwing in close ups and medium close ups. Though there were no shots linking these two groups, the clear impression for the passive viewer was that these groups were in close proximity and directly engaging each other.
No mention of stolen chickens.
Like a slap across the face I realized I was indeed part of a big grift, but it wasn’t me pretending to be something I wasn’t, it was the media pretending events were what they were not. It was at that moment that I entered the crucible and was baptized by fire. I had stared into the maw of the Big Lie, and I didn’t like what I saw.
Back in Cairo, I collected my substantial pay packet (cash in an envelope) and spent one last night swilling gin tonics and trading war stories at the Shepheard bar. No one talked about the Big Lie, so I kept my mouth shut, only now I could detect the barest glint of guilt behind the wizened eyes of my colleagues that I hadn’t seen before.
The next morning, I felt older and dirtier than I had when I arrived in Cairo. The world looked different as I boarded the ferry to Tel Aviv, a route established just a year before by the Camp David Accords, signed by Sadat and Begin, with a beaming Carter between them.
I had a feeling I had never known before — that the world we all thought we knew was nothing but a giant chicken fight.
And I was now part of it.
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Our cultural enrichment du jour is The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), helmed by Peter Weir, starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, with an Oscar-winning performance by Linda Hunt. An Australian reporter and his local interpreter/photographer scramble to cover the collapse of the Sorkarno regime in 1960s Indonesia. A great sense of place in this one.
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