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heat of battle
Sky News’ Nick Pollard tells Matthew Bell the secret of award-winning news coverage
awards extra
Sky News can’t stop winning awards. In January it scooped a breaking news gold medal at the New York Festivals for its coverage of the siege of Kunduz during the war in Afghanistan.
A month later it was named news channel of the year and won the news event of the year cate- gory for its coverage of the Soham murders at the Royal Television Society journalism awards.
More recently, that Soham coverage has also won the chan- nel a BAFTA for news coverage of the year.
“We were delighted when we won the other awards but in many ways the BAFTA is the top news award as far as we’re concerned; it has just one category for news coverage each year,” said Nick Pollard, Sky’s head of news.
Television coverage of the mur- ders of the 10-year-old schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman last August demanded sensitivity.
“We brought together very good journalism with a real human touch, which is a very deli- cate matter in such a story. We understood that it was an incredi- bly painful episode for the families and for the whole of the village. We had to approach it with sensi- tivity while still trying to cover what was a very important, emotive news story,” explained Pollard.
Jeremy Thompson anchored Sky News’ live coverage from Soham as the channel broadcast continuously, moving quickly from location to location and even gaining exclusive interviews with the eventual suspects. Its approach was recognised by the RTS, whose judges said it “stood above the rest for its freshness, energy and innovation.”
Live on-the-spot broadcasting is the key to Sky News’ success in covering the big stories. Last year it picked up a BAFTA for its coverage of the September 11 attacks on the US. Now, the 24-hour news channel has had another good war; this time in Iraq when it trounced its rivals, BBC News 24 and ITV News Channel, in the ratings.
“We recognised its impor- tance and threw everything at the story to the exclusion of everything else, and we took our presentation out of the studio and onto location, which per- haps other people didn’t do as successfully,” said Pollard.
In fact, Sky News was the first TV channel to broadcast live from the streets of Baghdad after US forces entered the Iraqi capital. Using a portable digital microwave link, which had been smuggled into the city three months earlier, Sky News correspon- dent David Chater interviewed the troops and Baghdad residents.
The digital link gave Chater and his crew the freedom to roam and shoot around the city. “We resisted the temptation to bring it out on previous occasions and just sat tight. Of course, this paid off wonderfully when the Americans turned up. We were able to go out and shoot without a single cable when everybody else was stuck in the Palestine Hotel,” Pollard added.
There has been much criti- cism that news channels became obsessed with military might, turning the war into a boy’s own adventure.
Pollard maintained, however, that Sky News’ live coverage of the war didn’t eclipse its studio analysis and explanation. “There was always a danger of letting
everything be dominated by the dramatic picture or the snapshot incident but I think we managed to avoid falling into that trap by trying to put things all the time into a wider context.”
Tragically, the war cost some journalists their lives. ITN corre- spondent Terry Lloyd was one of at least 14 journalists who died covering the war, while his cam- eraman Fred Nerac of France and translator Hussein Osman of Lebanon have been missing since Lloyd’s death on March 22.
“It was clearly very dangerous and I think sadly you have to assume that now. If there ever was a time when journalists were regarded as non-combatants by the armies on the battlefield, that time has gone,’ admitted Pollard.
Journalists have been accused of parroting the US and British government line, especially those who were embedded with the military. But for the journalists in the field, sticking close to the soldiers was often a matter of self-preservation.
“I’m sure we will have lots of dis- cussions about the role of journalists and embedding and what that does for journalistic independence, but I think in practice it was pretty clear that unless you were close to
a military unit it was too dangerous to operate,” said Pollard.
During the war Sky News had three maverick – as opposed to embedded – teams in Iraq: two in the south; one in the north.
“As soon as was practically possible, those two in the south of the country got themselves close to military units in the hope of guaranteeing their safety,” recalled Pollard. “The theory is that a maverick unit has more freedom to roam and more inde- pendence from the influence of the military, but other than in the north, around Kirkuk and Mosel, no one really operated a maver- ick team completely independ- ently of the military.”
Future conflicts, Pollard reck- oned, will be equally hazardous to report. “All wars are different and it’s difficult to draw general conclusions. However, I can’t see a time when journalism in and around a battlefield won’t be dangerous.”
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