DAVOS 2002
Reporter's notebook: Reporting by remote control
> BY ROMAN ROLLNICK
Copyright © 2002 by The Earth Times. All rights reserved

Lucky I felt, but perhaps somewhat jaded. I have had the privilege of a front row seat to history for the past 25 years. I have met many world leaders at big conferences] in Moscow, Paris, Brussels, Hong Kong. I have walked with Pope John Paul II to the grave of a priest murdered by secret police in Warsaw during his second visit to his native Poland at the height of the Cold War. We didn't talk, I just looked at his expression and the way he prayed. I remember a party at the US embassy in Moscow not long afterwards where Dave Brubaker played ''Take-five'' while four reporters enjoyed a cocktail with Henry Kissinger and heard all about what President Ronald Reagan felt about his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. I stood next to Gorbachev's late wife, Raisa, in the October snow on Red Square during the last Soviet celebration of the October Revolution. I remember Bishop Desmond Tutu leading the prayers in June 1976 in Regina Mundi Church in Soweto on a hot Sunday afternoon. We were holed up inside, while outside, at the height of the anti-apartheid uprising, police manning machine-gun posts refused to let anyone enter or leave until the following day. I walked with former UN Secretary General Xavier Perez de Cuellar through the human waste and misery of a place called Camp Korem at the height of the Ethiopian famine in 1984. People were dying all around us, and our brief conversation was interrupted by the rasping coughs of stick-like children with killer respiratory diseases. I will never forget the way a tough French Foreign Legion officer in Rwanda in 1994 burst into tears when we found the bodies of a group of women who had been decapitated, their daughters, not yet in their teens, still alive but unable to walk because their achilles tendons had been slashed by madmen with long knives. And I had tea with one of the great democrats of our times, Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, in Governor's House. It was two days before the handover to China. There was another tea in Cherrapnji with one of the last maharajas of India.

Southern Africa, the conflicts in Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, floods in Bangladesh, civil war in Algeria, Iraq during the Gulf War, Friday prayers in Iran, big NATO and European meetings in Brussels, and the horror in the city of Moscow in 1993 when the White House was shelled in mid-town and it seemed the world was falling apart all around us in a hail of bullets ... Why write about this and the personalities? Because a reporter has to be there to get the story, to convey to readers back home what is going on. I had the great luck to work for UPI in its heyday, and later for a great newspaper in London, as their chief correspondent. And I always remember the words of my editor who said: "Get out there and talk to people. We don't want stories written from clips, or Internet sites. Go and hear and smell the place and tell us what it's like."

So, naively perhaps, I came to New York this week thinking I would have some heady days with the world's movers and shakers and be able to report some of the latest thinking by the people who influence our lives so profoundly. I was particularly looking forward to the Forum because every year for the past 32 years, it has operated like a sort of town hall meeting, a place where Bishop Tutu can make small talk with Jack Greenberg, the chairman and CEO of McDonalds; where Kofi Annan can talk computers with Carleton S. Fiorina, chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard; where Hamid bin Ahmad al-Rifaie, president of the International Islamic Forum for Dialogue, can rub shoulders with Israel Meir Lau, Chief Rabbi of Israel; or where Colin Powell, the US secretary of state can meet French academics. And perhaps I, too, could meet and talk with some of them...

But I could not have been more wrong. I am jaded because I know politicians, businessmen, and stars all use journalists to convey their messages and inflate their egos. Otherwise we are traditionally viewed with mistrust, often as liars, especially when something appears in print that they do not like. Such was the unpleasant fuss this week over our story at the Forum because we said its organizers were discriminating against the world's media and denying them access.

On my side, I still try to keep an open mind, not to brand all businessmen and politicians as corrupt, or all lawyers as shysters out to make a quick buck. But when it comes to politicans and businessmen, I have never trusted them and they don't trust me, and it is the basis of our symbiotic relationship in this world. That said, by the very nature of our profession, we journalists are natural dissidents. But we do have to work like lawyers who often have to defend the indefensible, and we do it professionally and scrupulously because we are answerable to the public at large when we present a fact or when we quote someone.

Still the way we were treated at the Forum defied belief. It was rather insulting to be made to queue outside in the cold for well over two hours on the first day because the Forum's overstaffed public relations team only had one camera to take our mugshots and appeared thoroughly disorganized. And then to discover that the orange badges we were given allowed us access only to a neighboring hotel away from the conference venue in the Waldorf Astoria.

So how would we cover the meeting from the Inter-Continental Hotel around the corner? Not to worry, we were politely told, you have a large television screen in the press room here to relay the proceedings in real time. You have our website on which you can follow events. There were only four computers for over 400 journalists. Photographers were banned from the Waldorf, and television and radio people were told that, if they wanted, a member of the Forum's staff would take their recorders into the Waldord and plug them in for good-quality audio-visual reproduction at a cost of $250 a time.

I looked at the program. On the first day, Thursday, there were no fewer than 20 meetings, most of them on interesting topics which would be worth covering. The first was a meeting on the state of the world's economy with such eminent figures as Fan Gang, the national director of the Chinese Economic Research Institution; Jacob Frenkel, president of Merrill Lynch; Klaus Zimmermann, president of the German Institute for Economic Research. Another panel was on the subject of security and making the world safer with some of the foremost American and Russian experts like Sergei Karaganov, chairman of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and Gareth Evans, the former Australian premier who now heads the Brussels based International Crisis Group. There were meetings on artifical intelligence with the world's leading computer experts. And most newsworthy of all, one session with Colin Powell, US Secretary of State; Lord Robertson, the NATO secretary general; Hubert Védrine, the French foreign minister, and other statesmen who were set to debate the state of the world in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. It could not have been more interesting. But instead of broadcasting the important meetings to us, Forum organizers gave us a pipe-in of the artificial intelligence meeting for two hours, which no doubt would have been of interest to specialist computer and scientific magazines. We had to wait half a day for a press release on the meetings with Powell, Lord Robertson and Karaganov. The document merely summarized in three lines what each of them had said without giving the key quotes. The web site was not working properly for further information, if there was any to be had. I called my news editor, Alexandra Simou, in frustration and told her I was not in a position to do a proper job. I did not have a coveted white badge for entry to the Waldorf. At the public telephone alongside the one I was using, I heard José Passos of the major Brazilian daily O Globo, scream down the line at his editor: "I know I'm here in New York. I know I should get the story, but I have no access. Yes, I have accreditation, I know you worked on that for three months, but it is second-class accreditation. We are being discriminated against. I'm sorry I missed the Powell quotes. We never got them..."

Here he was, he said, in New York at great expense to cover the meeting, and he did not have a story to send back. Claus Tigge, the correspondent of the major German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , said he had told his newspaper he was going to pack up and leave. He would not be insulted by having to rely on information chosen for him, or on having to ask questions at 10-minute news conferences by personalities the Forum chose to wheel out to the press.

As the days dragged on, CNN said the meeting simply became "more and more opaque". The BBC described it as "secretive". Secretive indeed. But it was worse. We had all received written invitations to the convention, yet we were clearly unwelcome, and we were left to take the crumbs from the banquet table. The organizers of the public relations department run by a former NBC producer, Charles McLean, had decided on a strategy of what one journalist called a "subtle form of censorship". Be that as it may, the Forum known as 'Davos,' the Swiss mountain resort village where it is taditionally held, is a private club, and private clubs can invite whomever they choose. We accept that, we accept the situation, despite the frustrated howls of protest to our demanding editors.

But it turned nasty, too. I had to call my editor to say that our photographer, Amarjit Sidhu, had been barred from covering a meeting with Bill Gates to which he had been invited. McLean did not tell him why, but his people had started aggressively removing copies of our newspaper on Sunday for running a story about "media apartheid" that did not please the millionaire Swiss impresario Klaus Schwab, founder of the Forum. I was personally warned by one of his staff that if we insisted on distributing copies, we would all lose our second-class invitations. The action was petty and childish, and it damaged the Forum because our colleagues reported it far and wide.

Schwab was visibly infuriated when, at his final news conference, there were more questions about the treatment of this newspaper and the press than about the substance of his convention. And now he must be squirming. The Financial Times wrote about the plight of The Earth Times in its final report. Its senior editor, Guy de Jonquières, said that not only journalists, but businessmen and politicians were tired with the Davos formula, and with the fact that 45 minutes allotted to some meetings was simply not sufficient to discuss world affairs, and that the gathering had lost its old sparkle.

Schwab said he intended to move back to Davos next year. McLean insisted that the same control over the media and the message would apply. Judging by the reaction of the media, the meeting in New York merely served to heighten the perception among the public at large that the Davos gathering is an exclusive club, where the powerful and wealthy make decisions without cutting us in on the deal or clueing us in on what they're talking about. It serves to raise public hostility and resentment of the kind that has seen protesters dog every such meeting in recent years.

I have the privilege to work with some of the most senior journalists in the business at The Earth Times. Jack Freeman, who hails from NBC, the New York Post, CBS and Esquire magazine; the author and former New York Times star reporter John Corry; Selwyn Raab whose reports on a city police lieutenant he covered for the New York Times were turned into the television series Kojak; our editor-in-chief Pranay Gupte who was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and a wonderful team of younger journalists learning the trade the hard way. We don't mind being kept waiting in the rain. We laugh about their childish reaction to us. That Schwab might never have dirtied his shoes in a refugee camp with a starving, diseased child pulling at his coat, had bullets flying over his head, or smelt bodies in a mass grave is no concern of mine.

But if he is hosting meetings "Committed to Improving the State of the World", as his lofty logo states, he has a moral committment and a duty to to be more open. We will survive waking up and reading about the story we were supposed to be covering splashed all over the New York Times the next day. But Schwab and his Davos system may not, because next time there is no doubt that fewer people will be listening.