Home | Impartiality | Accuracy | Fairness | Respect | Independence

	Introduction   Interviewing: Kelly Shephard   Dealing with contributors: Ben Sutherland   Upholding privacy: Beatriz Gomez   Zimbabwe: Joseph Winter   Uzbekistan: Pahlavon Turgunov   On Mr Milosevic: Geraldine Coughlan   Safeguarding children in Africa: Valerie Msoka   Reflecting the Afghan people: Asif Maroof   Covering 9/11: Stephen Cviic   Bugging and recording   Anonymity   Paedophiles and identification   Accessing untransmitted material		Globally we should apply the principles of fair portrayal to all our international services, which should strive to present balanced pictures of the people and countries covered. Portraying the USA on September 11 - by Stephen Cviic, journalist at BBC News and former Brazil correspondent. News is supposed to be about out-of-the-ordinary events, and what could have been more extraordinary than September 11? I was in Washington at the time and believe that in the interest of fairness, ordinary life needs to be news as well. On the evening of 11 September 2001, I walked, bleary-eyed, towards the BBC Washington office from the flat where I was staying. After broadcasting non-stop for four hours after the suicide attacks on New York and Washington, I had been told to get some rest and prepare for a long night shift in front of the camera. Ordinary life in Washington Near the office, I noticed that a couple of restaurants were full of people. It struck me that this was not what people in London would expect, and I made a point of mentioning it in my reports as a way of showing that ordinary life of some sort was going on despite the attack on the Pentagon. News - especially foreign news - is a telescope with a very narrow focus. The bigger the event, the tighter the lens. In our own lives, we know that our day-to-day concerns might be of more importance to us than the resignation of this or that cabinet minister. We may go to the pub on general election night and talk about sport or pop music. But when we look at other countries, the narrow eye of the camera seems to say this is not so. I think we as journalists need to try to counter this. Portraying Brazil There is a particular problem about portraying countries that are not often in the news. I used to be the correspondent in Brazil, a country whose name conjures up images of football, Carnival, rainforest, coffee, shanty-towns and street children. All these things are Brazilian realities. But there is much else as well. As well as being factually accurate, we have to think of the effect our reports will have on the viewer and listener, and whether they will take away a fair impression of the place and peoples we are describing.

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