Broadcasting
Out of the picture
I have been shot more times than I have been credited by the BBC. Once, during the war in Kosovo, I was working for the corporation when I was shot. The incident made up a significant part of the correspondent's news report - the reporter explained how my mobile phone and wallet had stopped the bullet and saved my life. But even then I wasn't named. I was referred to as "our cameraman"; as if I was merely a damaged bit of equipment.
Many freelance cameramen risk their lives providing footage to TV news organisations, but we are hardly ever credited. Even when we are sent to difficult and dangerous places, some broadcasters write into the contract that we will not be credited for our work.
I was one of several video journalists who helped start an independent fringe in TV newsgathering in the late 1980s. We picked up small consumer cameras because we thought they would enable us to become independent contributors.
It was lonely and dangerous work, statistically more dangerous than any other part of foreign newsgathering. Half of the video journalists who operated out of the agency that I ran during the 1990s, Frontline News, were killed. But even that didn't earn us the recognition we so badly craved.
We, and other independents like us, would sell footage which would be incorporated into news reports and then voiced-over by a reporter - who was sometimes in the country where it was filmed, but rarely involved in filming.
Without recognition we found it impossible to command the rates that we needed to thrive - and this is still the case. If broadcasters credited freelance material properly, over time we could begin to be paid a decent wage. We could build our own agencies and take better care of our own safety.
Too often freelances are simply forgotten when the gongs are handed out. Which is why there is an annual awards ceremony that recognises freelance cameramen, the Rory Peck Awards, run by the Rory Peck Trust. Rory was one of my original partners in Frontline News. He was killed in Russia in 1993.
But little has changed in the news industry's practices. It is perhaps unsurprising that there are few independent TV freelances today in Britain. And the quality of our news suffers. But the audience doesn't see that.
Vaughan Smith
Disability
Beyond a joke
When it comes to championing the cause of disabled people in the media, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the decidedly un-politically correct South Park series, may not immediately spring to mind. But one of their creations, wheelchair user Timmy, has been shortlisted for a people of the year award from Radar, Britain's biggest pan-disability campaigning network.
Timmy, who has serious physical and learning disabilities, elicits mixed emotions, says Caroline Ellis, deputy CEO of Radar. "Some people just aren't comfortable with him. But what his popularity does show is a growing confidence in the disabled community. Just like anyone else, disabled people have got an active and sophisticated sense of humour, and are more than willing to take the mickey out of themselves."
As Kelly Knox, who earlier this year won Britain's Missing Top Model - in which eight disabled women vied for the chance to appear in a fashion magazine - puts it: "Timmy gives as good as he gets. He just gets on with it, and that is a really positive message."
Top Model, also up for an award, showed its contestants bitching, flirting and getting drunk - much like any other group of girls thrown together in an artificial scenario, says Ellis. "Disabled people are not inherently more virtuous, or heroic or vulnerable," she says. "They are just normal people who face extraordinary challenges, and at last we are starting to see that on our screens."
Andrew Bran, managing director of Top Model producers Love Productions, says that the clash of the fashion world with the disabled world made for good TV, and challenged preconceptions on both sides. "Many of the fashion team had never worked with disabled people before, and vice versa," he says. "There is more work to be done, but we are gradually moving in the right direction, using disabled actors in their own right and not just to fill a disability storyline."
Of the 11 Radar awards, the BBC is up for seven - a recognition of its commitment to portraying disability in "a positive and sympathetic way", says Mary FitzPatrick, head of diversity.
But we are not there yet, says Ellis. "It's getting better, but to a certain extent disabled people are still an invisible group in the media." She hopes that seeing a disabled person on our screens will become entirely unremarkable. "We'll know we've made a real breakthrough when we see a disabled presenter reading the 10pm news."
Alexandra Topping