What’s it like to cover news in America right now? Since the re-election of Donald Trump in November last year, breaking news from the US political sphere has been constant with rafts of new policies and measures from the newly-elected President. 

Gary O’Donoghue, the BBC’s Senior North America correspondent, has covered news and politics from the USA for just over a decade now. In a talk at the University of West London, he shared what life is like as a journalist in America, working in the media with a disability, and the importance of getting the facts right.

Reporting on America right now

The President of the United States, regardless of who they happen to be, will always make headlines. The current Trump administration is constantly in the news, meaning there is no regular working day for Gary:

‘There’s no predictability to our working day. We are constantly on call. Some of this is at very short notice. You’re working incredibly long hours, and that’s because of the nature of the news cycle at the moment, and the nature of events that are going on.’

Gary admitted that it’s creating ‘a huge pressure on journalists to react, to explain, and to report what’s really been happening during the last couple of weeks’, during what he described as a ‘blizzard of news’.

The pressures don’t end there. Gary shared how access is ‘quite limited’, with the BBC not currently considered a priority by the President. Accessing information has been made more difficult for another reason, as Gary explained:

‘The Associated Press is one of the absolute institutions of my business. Everyone relies on their wire services all around the world because of their high standards. They’ve been kicked out of the White House for refusing to accept that the Gulf of Mexico is now called the Gulf of America’.

Getting the facts right

With misinformation and disinformation on the rise, it’s more important than ever that journalists are reporting the facts. After the attempted assassination of Trump, Gary and his team managed to find an eye witness who claimed that they had seen the shooter. They had to decide whether to put him on air or not:

‘If we put him on air and he is making it up, then that has the potential to make a bad situation worse. There’s a huge responsibility on whether to put someone live. I had a quick chat to him off air and asked him over and over again and he was consistent with his story. With a bit of luck, we managed to get the actual facts.’

This interview was then used by all the other major networks and seen on social media by over 300 million people. By getting an accurate witness account quickly, it meant that theories and speculation weren’t allowed to gain traction online.

The BBC has the added concern of remaining impartial in its reporting. Gary doesn’t believe that this makes their coverage ‘vanilla’. For him, ‘impartiality is more of a subtle idea. It’s an attempt to educate and inform, which is our duty, but also to analyse on the basis of our judgement and our experiences’. 

Working as a disabled journalist

Despite being told at 21 that ‘blind people can’t be reporters’, Gary became the BBC’s first disabled foreign correspondent. He also believes that being blind has certain benefits when it comes to being a journalist:

‘You’re seen as different, and that gives you a certain kind of resilience and a certain kind of ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes. For journalism, I think that’s fantastic. It’s a real requisite that you are able to listen and to empathise with people.’

The practical barriers of his early days in the industry – having to ask researchers to read out research and clippings and record them on cassettes – have largely gone with innovations in tech. 

Despite this, Gary believes that more needs to be done by broadcasters to get disabled people into journalism:

‘You don’t see enough disabled people on air. You don’t see enough disabled people behind the camera, either. Things are improving but the reason I think it’s important is for trust. If you don’t look and sound and walk and talk like the whole population then why should I believe in you and trust in you. It’s incredibly important that broadcasters, not just the BBC, are rooted in our communities and draw on people from all communities in order to win and maintain people’s trust’.

Covering politics and need extra comment, statistics, or contact details for spokespeople? Try the ResponseSource Journalist Enquiry Service.