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 When dealing with members of the public, you may need to check and corroborate contributors' details several times and you may need documentary evidence to validate stories. Checking contributors in Africa - by Beatrice Murail, Senior Producer, French Service Eyewitness accounts are an essential part of the BBC's coverage of news and current affairs. First-person testimonies best reflect the human impact of traumatic events such as war, disease or natural disasters. They are a perfect complement to dispatches and interviews. A human-interest story told straight from the horse's mouth will be poignant. It will tell a complicated tale in a simple way that those on the receiving end can relate to, on radio, TV or the internet. After all, an event becomes news only when it has repercussions for people, either directly or indirectly. Eyewitness accounts The eyewitness account format was ideal for a series of eight 15-minute radio programmes on refugees in Guinea, Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa that I produced for the BBC in 2001. The refugee issue is usually tackled in the third person by the media. The statistics, editorials and interviews with third parties that the media uses, often fail to convey the suffering experienced by these people. The aim of the series was to give a voice to those who seldom have a chance to speak for themselves and to put across their side of the story. Politicians, experts and aid workers are so much easier to interview from a studio. Validating stories It can be difficult to check contributors' stories, but I found that the longer I spent with each interviewee, the easier it was to spot contradictions and thus to weed out unreliable accounts. I was also able to validate most of the stories refugees told me with aid workers and United Nations staff who had been working with them for some time. I had the feeling that I had reached one of my objectives when I received a letter from a listener in Ivory Coast who told me that his attitude to refugees had changed after hearing one of the radio programmes. He said he had not realised refugees were ordinary people like you and me, whose personal lives had been totally disrupted. One of the refugees I interviewed had watched, helpless, as soldiers ate his baby girl. Eyewitness accounts, by definition, are not objective and impartial reports, but they can contribute to a more accurate and more comprehensive picture. |
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