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In March this year, three children tried to
cross a stream near their homes. One young
boy was swept away and drowned. In normal
circumstances, this unfortunate accident
would not be expected to make international
news headlines. But the incident happened
in a part of Europe where life is not ‘normal’,
near the deeply divided town of Mitrovica
in Kosovo. The Albanian-language TV and
radio channels began broadcasting rumours
that the children had been chased into the
water by a gang of Serbs who had set a dog
on them. Within hours, nearly a thousand
Serbian families were being driven from their
homes by enraged Albanians. And as the
reports of this new round of ‘ethnic cleansing’
in Kosovo reached Serbia, crowds took to
the streets, intent on retaliation. In Belgrade,
the historic Central Mosque was burned to
the ground.
An inquiry by the OSCE, the Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, into
this surge of ethnic violence concluded that
it had been the direct result of ‘reckless,
irresponsible and biased television
journalism’. Their report says that the story
of the children being chased by Serbs was
‘unsupported by any journalistically valid
accounts’, and accuses the major
broadcasters in the region of contributing
to a mood of vengeful persecution through
‘sloppy and tendentious reporting’.
Just a month after this outbreak of
violence, I travelled from the UK to the
Balkans to lead the ‘South-East Europe
Television Journalism Workshop’,
designed to encourage higher-quality TV
reporting across the region. The workshop
also sought to promote greater
understanding between different national
and religious groups, by bringing together
journalists from countries which until quite
recently were at war with each other. The
role of television during these Balkan wars
has been well documented; broadcasters
on all sides used hate-speech and
propaganda techniques to whip up fanatical
nationalism based on prejudice and fear.
So it was pleasing to see young
professionals getting to know colleagues
from other countries, comparing
experiences, and sharing a strong desire
for a better future in the region. Twenty-
five reporters and news producers, many
in their twenties or early thirties, came
from a mixture of public and private TV
stations in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia
FYR, Montenegro, Southern Hungary and
Serbia. The one-week workshop was
organised by T-Media on behalf of four
major organisations which support
independent and responsible journalism in
the region – the Swedish Helsinki
Committee for Human Rights, the Dutch-
based Press Now Foundation, the Irex
ProMedia programme funded by USAID,
and the British Embassy in Belgrade.
The location of the workshop was a small
town near Budva on the Adriatic coast
of Montenegro. We took over a small
hotel that had once been a rest-home for
President Tito, though our young
journalists had certainly not been invited
there for a rest. Despite the tranquil
setting, it was an intensive week, mixing
a great deal of practical work with
discussions about journalism and
detailed analysis of programmes. The T-
Media style is to encourage ‘learning by
doing’, so we turned our hotel into a
small production centre, with computers
for research and scripting, four digital
cameras, and four laptop editing systems,
operated by an experienced international
team of multi-skilled technicians led by
our technical director, Roger Mulliner,
Seeking better TV news in Europe
Rick Thompson
is a former BBC News Editor, now Director of T-Media and Visiting
Professor of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Central England in Birmingham. He
reports on a recent television journalism workshop in South-East Europe and reflects on
why this kind of support is essential to reduce conflict in troubled regions of the world.
a former BBC picture-editor and camera-
operator. For the practical exercises, the
journalists were divided into four
working teams, with two editorial tutors
supervising two teams each. Both the
tutors have direct experience of
broadcast journalism in regional centres,
which is more relevant to the low-cost
television operations in the Balkans than
comparisons with the larger international
broadcast operations, and both tutors
have experience of training. John Boileau
is a former News Editor at ITV Central
in England, now in charge of Training
and Development there. Mindy Leigh,
now working in Italy, was a regional
reporter and news editor with the BBC –
one of the corporation’s journalism
trainers and newsroom computer experts,
training hundreds of journalists in new
production methods.
We were acutely aware that this British-led
team should not tell the participants to copy
BBC news style. This was a workshop, not
a training school. The journalists had to
decide for themselves which style of
television news would work best for their
own audiences. And they came from very
different TV stations. Some were from
former communist state broadcasters which
are finding it very difficult to release
themselves from direct government control,
and which have large budget deficits caused
by reduced funding and inefficient working
methods. Others came from small regional
stations. Private broadcasting in South-East
Europe has been relatively unregulated for
many years. Every town seems to have
several radio and television stations. In
Serbia alone there are thought to be over
300 TV stations – many of them run by local
mayors or municipalities, and some by
successful businessmen wishing to promote
their own interests.
Yet from all parts of the region there was
clearly a general appreciation of British
broadcasting standards, and a widely-
held view that BBC World sets a ‘classic’
standard that they would like to emulate.
And with the English language widely
spoken in the region by young people,
the workshop had to be conducted in
English. There was also interest in
Rick Thompson
during the recent course in the Balkans.
Above right - the picturesque Budva countryside.
Right - learning camerawork and presentation for
Budva Tonight
on regional televison
