Journalists on telly? You couldn't make it up... (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Journalists on telly? You couldn't make it up...

12:23pm Friday 16th March 2007

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We journalists get a raw deal. No matter how much of our job could be considered noble, worthy or for the general good of mankind, we end up getting tarred by the same brush as the tabloid hacks widely regarded as the amoebas of pond life among the rich, famous and anyone else who has reason to distrust the red tops.

The day after Princess Diana died a photographer I worked with was literally chased to his car by a pair of angry women spitting the words "murdering paparazzi" at him and practically heaping the blame for the Paris car crash on his shoulders. He'd been covering an open gardens event in a country village in south Leicestershire.

Any journalist who's covered court cases, inquests, public meetings or the dreaded door-knocking required after a fatal accident will at some point in their career have been ticked off, shouted at or even threatened by an angry member of the public. It goes with the job.

But we seem to suffer most at the hands of the producers and writers of TV dramas, particularly soaps.
Nothing makes my blood boil more than the lazy, cliched and inaccurate portrayal of reporters - and reporting - in our soaps. Emmerdale is currently the worst offender.

First off, there's Jasmine Thomas whose work experience on the Hotten Courier appears to involve her investigating the murder of businessman Tom King, (although why anyone cares anymore is beyond me. It's been so long since he plunged to his death you'd be hard pressed to actually remember who he was, let alone care who bumped him off). Jasmine, who's all of about 16-years-old, keeps having secret meetings with the Hotten Courier editor in dark lay-bys, passing on mysterious papers and snippets of gossip she's picked up from around the village about who's who in the murder suspect stakes.

Anyone who's ever done work experience on a local paper will know that, in reality, re-writing press releases, churning out 80-word pieces about church jumble sales and shadowing reporters at town council meetings is about as exciting as it gets.

On more than one occasion Jasmine has been scolded in a rather sinister way by her editor (although, since she's not actually employed by the Hotten Courier, he's not actually her editor), for not coming up with enough juice on the murder.

Utter nonsense. For a start, Jasmine wouldn't be let anywhere near such a big story, and then there's the small matter of subjudicy. The three King brothers have been charged with their father's murder and are awaiting a preliminary hearing. So no newspaper in the land - even in Soapland - would be allowed to report on any aspect of the case other than what is said in court.

Yet as soon as the brothers were given bail, a reporter from the Hotten Courier rang Tom's widow for a quote "about how the trial was going." She obliged, spouting some nonsense about having faith in the British legal system. That would be the same legal system that would put any journalist in contempt of court if they reported on anything other than the trial itself.

Haven't the Emmerdale producers, or indeed the Hotten Courier, heard of the National Council for the Training of Journalists? It takes more than a trench coat, a trilby and a notepad to become a journalist. There's the small matter of training courses and exams in all manner of subjects, not least the law and how it applies to journalism. It takes several years to qualify, after on-the-job training combined with old-fashioned studying.

So it's both laughable and insulting to see woefully inaccurate cliches of soap journalism being peddled on our TV screens, perpetuating the myth that we reporters fill newspapers with whatever comes into our heads.

Brookside used to be the worst. Among the many gaffes made by the former Channel 4 soap was a rather daft storyline about a virus scare which saw the Close cordoned off. The local 'paper ran a front page story blaming Ron Dixon's food shop for spreading the virus. The first he knew about this was reading the paper. As if! Does the word defamation mean anything?

Another storyline involved a group of residents being held hostage in one of the houses. Understandably, the press reported on this. This caused uproar among other residents of the Close, who were purple with rage that "scum" reporters were hanging around near their homes trying to get their story. They spouted venom, calling journalists everything under the sun - and all the time they were reading their "scum" newspapers and watching TV news coverage of said siege. Did they think it was all coming from the magic news fairy?

A former colleague and I became so fed up with the portrayal of our profession that we set up a campaign to try and put an end to it. We called it, imaginatively, SOAP (Stop Our Awful Portrayal) - yes, it's a rubbish name but it made us laugh - and we sent off press releases to the production companies behind the main soaps. We had no response from anyone.

And so the 'awful portrayal' of journalism continues. Police officers, teachers, nurses, doctors, firefighters, sex therapists, vets and even lawyers are presented in a generally sympathetic light in TV dramas but journalists continue to be portrayed as sleazy, underhand, unscrupulous and usually wearing a trench coat.

There's room for a decent drama about a busy newsroom, staffed by real people rather than outdated stereotypes. Kay Mellor, if you're reading this - I had the idea first.