Mark Austin interview, continued...
So how does a serious, award-winning foreign correspondent justify swapping the front line for a studio - beyond, of course, the £300,000 he is now reported to earn? "I will absolutely admit it is not the most taxing job in the world," he says. "But there does come a time when you earn your money, when it all goes wrong around you and you have to hold it together.
"Are we overpaid? I don't know, you tell me. But they probably wouldn't pay me what I'm paid if they didn't think I was worth it. There are some pretty young things [reading the news] who are also technically very adept newscasters." He pauses. "There are also clearly some who aren't..."
Some have suggested that Austin won the job partly on account of his looks, which played well particularly with women viewers in ITN's research. "I don't think that came into it," he says diffidently, displaying a straightforward, courteous charm rather than any inherently forceful charisma. "Your question's premise is slightly flawed, my wife would say wholly flawed. I can just hear her now, guffawing out loud. No, there have been no facelifts, there's no wardrobe allowance. I haven't even got an office yet."
As a child, Austin can only remember wanting to be a foreign correspondent ("apart from an England cricketer"). Growing up in Bournemouth, the son of a company director and a teacher, he was inspired by watching Martin Bell, Brian Barron and Michael Nicholson. He joined the Bournemouth Evening Echo straight after his A-levels - "in many ways I regret not going to university" - and then took a BBC World Service job before switching to BBC TV. He joined ITN in 1986 as a sports correspondent, moving on to report from Asia, Africa and the Balkans.
He misses being in the field, he says, which is why his newsreading contract allows him to continue reporting from foreign hotspots. "But I do have three young children [aged eight, 11 and 13], and there was increasing risk. It's getting much more difficult to operate in environments where foreign journalists are often becoming targets. The so-called war on terror has led to journalists being perceived as fair game." He was with fellow ITN reporter Terry Lloyd in Iraq the night before Lloyd and two colleagues were killed. "I suppose I can trace back to that incident one reason why, with kids, I questioned whether I really wanted to carry on doing it."
He felt most vulnerable in Burundi and Rwanda in 1994. "There were no front lines, you didn't know who to trust, and you felt permanently at risk because you had a 4x4," he says. "At one stage, I was in Rwanda and my wife [a doctor] was working in a South African hospital treating people coming in with machete wounds. I can remember talking to her on a satellite phone, saying, 'This is ridiculous.' We did discuss then whether these jobs were completely sensible. But one of my great methods of self-protection is my innate cowardice."
At times, particularly in Rwanda and Mozambique, his professional detachment turned to anger. "There are issues about how the UN operates and whether it gets there fast enough, which it clearly didn't in Rwanda or Sudan. In Rwanda, you'd film a mother trying to breastfeed a baby, the mother starving to death, and the kid dies when you're filming. You can't walk away from that without it affecting you. It makes you angry, actually. Then it makes you think, 'What on earth is going on? What are organisations like the UN for, what are aid agencies for?' Then you see the arguments that rage between aid agencies and different officers of the UN, and you get even angrier."
He was in Ramallah five years ago, caught in a gun battle between Israelis and Palestinians, when his mobile rang. It was Claudia Rosencrantz, ITV's entertainment controller, begging him to reconsider an earlier refusal to host Survivor. "I just thought, 'Well, let's give it a go,'" he recalls, a little uncomfortably. "But it was a one-off. It paid the school fees for a while, but I wouldn't do it again."
He earned around £150,000 for two months' work, but critics panned the programme and questioned whether Austin had sold his professional integrity. "It didn't do as badly as everyone seemed to think," he says defensively. "It got seven, eight million viewers. But I'd wake up listening to my short-wave radio hoping some amazing news story hadn't broken. All these entertainment luvvies couldn't work out why I was listening to the World Service, but it taught me that I couldn't imagine doing anything apart from news."
What matters, he insists, is being there to tell the story. "You can have all the technology and feeds in the world, but there will never be a substitute for seeing for yourself and reporting. That's real, pure journalism - filming it yourself, talking to people, coming to your own conclusions and providing a thoughtful wellfilmed package.
"That's what ITN still does, better than anyone else in British television. And if we ever stop doing that, come back and talk to me then."
(Evening Standard, February 1 2006)
"Are we overpaid? I don't know, you tell me. But they probably wouldn't pay me what I'm paid if they didn't think I was worth it. There are some pretty young things [reading the news] who are also technically very adept newscasters." He pauses. "There are also clearly some who aren't..."
Some have suggested that Austin won the job partly on account of his looks, which played well particularly with women viewers in ITN's research. "I don't think that came into it," he says diffidently, displaying a straightforward, courteous charm rather than any inherently forceful charisma. "Your question's premise is slightly flawed, my wife would say wholly flawed. I can just hear her now, guffawing out loud. No, there have been no facelifts, there's no wardrobe allowance. I haven't even got an office yet."
As a child, Austin can only remember wanting to be a foreign correspondent ("apart from an England cricketer"). Growing up in Bournemouth, the son of a company director and a teacher, he was inspired by watching Martin Bell, Brian Barron and Michael Nicholson. He joined the Bournemouth Evening Echo straight after his A-levels - "in many ways I regret not going to university" - and then took a BBC World Service job before switching to BBC TV. He joined ITN in 1986 as a sports correspondent, moving on to report from Asia, Africa and the Balkans.
He misses being in the field, he says, which is why his newsreading contract allows him to continue reporting from foreign hotspots. "But I do have three young children [aged eight, 11 and 13], and there was increasing risk. It's getting much more difficult to operate in environments where foreign journalists are often becoming targets. The so-called war on terror has led to journalists being perceived as fair game." He was with fellow ITN reporter Terry Lloyd in Iraq the night before Lloyd and two colleagues were killed. "I suppose I can trace back to that incident one reason why, with kids, I questioned whether I really wanted to carry on doing it."
He felt most vulnerable in Burundi and Rwanda in 1994. "There were no front lines, you didn't know who to trust, and you felt permanently at risk because you had a 4x4," he says. "At one stage, I was in Rwanda and my wife [a doctor] was working in a South African hospital treating people coming in with machete wounds. I can remember talking to her on a satellite phone, saying, 'This is ridiculous.' We did discuss then whether these jobs were completely sensible. But one of my great methods of self-protection is my innate cowardice."
At times, particularly in Rwanda and Mozambique, his professional detachment turned to anger. "There are issues about how the UN operates and whether it gets there fast enough, which it clearly didn't in Rwanda or Sudan. In Rwanda, you'd film a mother trying to breastfeed a baby, the mother starving to death, and the kid dies when you're filming. You can't walk away from that without it affecting you. It makes you angry, actually. Then it makes you think, 'What on earth is going on? What are organisations like the UN for, what are aid agencies for?' Then you see the arguments that rage between aid agencies and different officers of the UN, and you get even angrier."
He was in Ramallah five years ago, caught in a gun battle between Israelis and Palestinians, when his mobile rang. It was Claudia Rosencrantz, ITV's entertainment controller, begging him to reconsider an earlier refusal to host Survivor. "I just thought, 'Well, let's give it a go,'" he recalls, a little uncomfortably. "But it was a one-off. It paid the school fees for a while, but I wouldn't do it again."
He earned around £150,000 for two months' work, but critics panned the programme and questioned whether Austin had sold his professional integrity. "It didn't do as badly as everyone seemed to think," he says defensively. "It got seven, eight million viewers. But I'd wake up listening to my short-wave radio hoping some amazing news story hadn't broken. All these entertainment luvvies couldn't work out why I was listening to the World Service, but it taught me that I couldn't imagine doing anything apart from news."
What matters, he insists, is being there to tell the story. "You can have all the technology and feeds in the world, but there will never be a substitute for seeing for yourself and reporting. That's real, pure journalism - filming it yourself, talking to people, coming to your own conclusions and providing a thoughtful wellfilmed package.
"That's what ITN still does, better than anyone else in British television. And if we ever stop doing that, come back and talk to me then."
(Evening Standard, February 1 2006)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, January 31, 2001
<< Home