Peter Nolan

On the move

I've just started accessing blogs while I'm away from my desktop using my PDA, using Bloglines Mobile.  This allows me to read a hell of a lot more than I otherwise would and avoids the impulse-buying of books, magazines and newspapers that I'm partial too. 

A lot of dirty book stores in London will keep their stock in their basements, keeping a ground-floor shopfront of unobjectionalbe material, usually dusty and neglected remaindered books, on the ground floor.  Often on my way home from the West End in London, I'll drop into one of these, which is usually open later than any other bookstore.  I hope that I don't get noticed doing this, as a reputation as a sad porn-addict is the last thing that I need. 

Now, if I could only get bloglines on the Tube....

Old Friends

In the meantime, some old friends are making an appearance in the comments over at Irish Eagle. The dogs may bark but the car drives on. 

The New New Republic

The New Republic has had an injection of capital and is beefing up its already considerable web presence.  Of all the American political opinion magazines, The National Interest, American Interest, Commentary, Nation, National Review and Weekly Standard, TNR is still the best-written and most open-minded. 

Along with articles on the web, the magazine has made a major push into blogging, The Plank, Open University and now even one for its editor, The Spine, written by the indomitable Martin Peretz.  According to the New York Times story by Katharine Seelye,

Mr. Peretz, 67, has himself become a blogger. He said he was “not enjoying it exactly,” but that he had found it addictive.

“When I used to see something irritating, I would typically call a friend,” he said. “Now I just go to the blog.” He said he is often surprised at how quickly readers will post a response. “It’s as if they’re waiting for something,” he said. “Then they say, ‘Ah, here he is. I’m going to pounce.’ ”

On the Frontline

In the last six months, I've been spending a lot of my time at the Frontline Club in Paddington. 

I've always been a news junkie, so being at Frontline is the equivalent of setting up home in the Golden Triangle, in the heart of the raw supply. 

It's run by Vaughan Smith, a legendary British TV cameraman, perhaps most famous for spending several months wandering around amidst the British and American forces in Saudi Arabia before the launch of  Desert Storm, the operation to retake Kuwait from Saddam Hussein, in 1991.  While pretending to be a British officer, with the aid of an ID card produced using the laminating machine of the British Embassy tennis club in Bahrain, he surreptitiously took footage outside the restrictions imposed by the military's pooling system for journalists. 

Back in the eighties and nineties, the logistical difficulties of getting into dangerous and remote places created an opening for Smith and his freelance colleagues at what was then the Frontline agency to provide pictures to national broadcasters.  Although the BBC's mantra was that no story was worth a life, many of Frontline's associates did indeed give their lives to get the stories - in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Africa and, in the case ofthe larger than life Anglo-Irishman Rory Peck, Moscow during the 1993 parliamentary coup against Yeltsin.   Their story is told in the book Frontline by ITN's David Loyn, which I took with me on my trip to the Mid East over the new year.  You won't find a better collection of tales of the most perilous adventures and colourful characters to be found anywhere in the last quarter century anywhere else.

One facile assumption the book overturns is that there'll always be someone on hand to record the news.  The story of Frontline shows just how difficult is was to collect the stories that, even now, never having seen them since they first aired nearly twenty years ago, I still remember vividly - like John Simpson driving into Kabul just after the Russians left, in the company of two mujahadeen double agents in the secret police.

Nowadays journalists routinely targeted by insurgents and terrorists.  One day in suburban Riyadh in 2004, the bulk of the members of the Saudi branch of Al Qaeda were driving past when they noticed another Irish freelancer, the Irish freelance cameraman Simon Cumbers filming with the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardiner.  They shot the pair, killing Cumbers and crippling Gardiner, who remains in a wheelchair.  Gardiner is still doing the same job for the BBC.  Cumbers is buried in Wicklow and is memorialised in an annual request funded by his friends and admirers among the Irish and international press.

The Frontline Club membership includes many such war correspondents, both old and the new generation, along with admen, assorted journalists, photographers and another old Iraq hand, a gentlemen listed on the membership roll as  "Mr Andrew McNab".   

The costs of security for foreign staff is making news-gathering in dangerous places the most economic function to hand off to low-paid and disposable locals or third-world staff or else encouraged the battleship effect of overprotection and huge entourages of security people.  Ironically, the growing dominance of a few global networks, especially the BBC, is increasingly making freelance TV work uneconomic.  Frontline stands as a monument to these men and women and the sacrifices that they made.