Across the pond

In my last blog I took issue with the Rottweiler, Jeremy Paxman, for telling a City University student, that they were wasting their time doing a course. All you needed to know in journalism could be learnt in three weeks. Since then Geoffrey Cox has died. He was even older than Robert Magabe, aged 97. But he has not been trying to go on running the News at Ten, whose continued existence owes more to him than most of the founding fathers.

The battles he had to fight were to get the News at Ten extended from 15 minuties, which was what the advortisers wanted, to half an hour. After Cox departed from the scene, the advertisers shifted their attack, by moving the News at Ten, to another time. To suit the needs of their advertisers. After many battles the News at Ten has been re-instated at 10, by Michael Grade.

And the avuncular Trevor Macdonald, who is even blacker than Barack Obama, is back there with lots of credibility. And a pleasing alternative to the Beeb, most of whose non-whites, are rather fetching females, and young enough to be Trevor’s grandchildren. But the battle is far from won.

Geoffrey Cox, did not have any journalism training at all.

He was, like Robert Magabe, a colonial. A New Zealander who did a hiistory degree in one of our far off colonies inhabited by sheep farmers. But, because he got a first, he went on to do a rather posh degree at Oxford, the BA in Philiosphy, Politics, and Economics. But he set his own agenda.

This from The Independent obituary.

A convivial and highly intelligent man, Cox was also a brave and resourceful correspondent. In 1932 he had entered Oriel College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand, where he had gained a first class degree in History from Otago University. At Oxford he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics and travelled widely in Europe during the vacations. Challenged by a German Rhodes scholar in 1934 to see the true face of Nazism, Cox served for three weeks in the Arbeitsdienst, the Nazi youth service, draining marshes and drilling with spades instead of guns. An article he wrote on the German labour camps led the Sunday supplement of The New York Times and was also printed in The Spectator. This in turn helped him to secure a reporting job on the News Chronicle.

So although Cox did not go a journalism course, that is how he learnt his journalism.

It got him a job on the News Chronicle, so that he learnt his journalism, not in covering weddings and funerals, but in covering wars, at which lives were at risk.

 Including his own.

Which is the present reality for all journalists out there. Including John Simpson, who is reporting from Zimbabwe, although he is not supposed to be there. Including the New York Times reporter, who has been arrested and is now in jail, and an unamed British reporter, who is presumably being helped by the British embassy. But they have not told us yet, even who he (or she) is.

These reporters are risking their lives to tell the world what is happening in this former colony. Like Geoffrey Cox, when he went off to cover the Spanish Civil War, they did not go there in a gung ho frame of mind.

They believed in the myth of journalism. That journalism is worth doing because journalists try and convey to the folks back home, what it is like on the front line.

That is what Geoffrey Cox stood for.

We should honour his memory.

And we should work to nurture those young would-be journalists. Whether they be on journalilsm courses, or like Cox, learning journalism in their own way, to follow in the footsteps of those who have tried to interest the public in matters which are rather rather crucial to the nation and the planet.

Cox, if he were reporting today, would be trying to put Mugabe in historical context. A tyrant, yes, but one produced by the coup d’etat by Ian Smith, the white leader who went for unilateral independence for what was then called Southern Rhodesia in 1965.