Oh to be a hack now that news is here!
A rare 24 hours. It’s been a rollercoaster news moment.
We all know that there are days when very little happens and, as journalists, we have to work overtime to distinguish one day’s events from another. But last night a cascade of happenings toppled into one another.
Even at the sporting level, there was the backdrop of England scrabbling through to the next round of the World Cup. Then the world’s longest grand slam tennis match in history – currently 59 all in the 5th set at Wimbledon.
But the big stuff centred on President Obama carpeting the top allied general in Afghanistan – General Stanley McChrystal. He sacked him as we know – He came out to say so at 17 minutes before we were on air at 7.00pm. Afghan policy in crisis…but exactly why?
But we were already wrestling with the accident on the sea-bed 5,000 feet down in the Gulf of Mexico. Could it get worse? Word was that the cap tapping some of the gushing oil had been taken off following some sort of collision with an unmanned underwater vehicle (the cap has since been reinstalled). And then came word that two workers at the disaster had lost their lives but mysteriously had done so in circumstances unrelated to it.
In three hours our ‘lead’ veered from England’s football victory to BP’s catastrophe, to McChrystal’s sacking.
Yet battling for air was the budget fall-out. The strong hint from Chancellor George Osborne’s statement earlier in the day that further cuts in the benefits bill were in the pipeline (sorry to use that word).
It’s at these moments that news and purveying it become an intoxicating mix of retrieval, analysis, and waiting for yet another shoe to drop.
This very morning it did. I wake up this morning to find that Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (who so recently appeared to be the country’s long term leadership hope) had been distasted after only three years in the job as Australia’s prime minister – to be replaced by the first Aussie woman to hold the office, Welsh-born Julia Gillard. The country’s massive multinational mining companies are in the frame having opposed Rudd’s effort to tax their ‘excess profits’ to fund Australia’s budget.
Yet another news challenge – as we see one multinational corporation tamed in the Gulf of Mexico, and others half a world away seeing their nemesis disposed of by the Australian Labor Party.
Want to know why we love the job? What a challenge! What a privilege!