Let’s take the piss out of journalists for a bit, shall we?

Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that the New Orleans is now my second home (although I kept thinking it was called the Old Orleans, like the café/bar in Nottm, briefly regarded as the acme of cool when I was in 6th form).

Anyway, The New Orleans is a nice place, open courtyard, plenty of shade. Prayer flags and trees and a good soundtrack. The food is terrible, and over-priced, but it has wireless internet and plugs, so I can sit here all day working and surfing and ordering cups of tea and smoking fags. Which is much better than going to an internet café.

Before adopting the New Orleans I was going to internet cafes to check my email and the news and do research for my articles. Then transferring any documents to my flashdrive via the good offices of the wee lad running the place (because the USB ports on most of the machines wouldn’t work). Sometimes this would be a relatively quick process. Sometimes it would be slow. All depending on the IT literacy of the wee lad. One place I used about six or seven times and got a different lad, who did it a different way, each time. The longest took 35 minutes.

THEN, I would go back to the hotel and start writing, constantly realising little things I wanted to check or look up. Although to be fair, constant net availability makes us endlessly fussy. I’d be forced to admit, ‘Fuck it, I don’t need to check when the Palaeolithic was, I can just write “Stone Age”!’ But once I’d finished writing I’d return to the internet café and play nerd-roulette again to email stuff or post on here. It was all very annoying.

As you can imagine, wall to wall wi-fi, has been a joy. And from my own pc, so I don’t need to transfer documents, and I don’t need to be constantly typing in the same URLs and passwords over and over again. Ah, blessed relief! I could totally do my job here forever, as long as I didn’t need to phone people much. All the comforts of working from home, but better. Because other people bring you food and drinks and people come in and talk to you! It’s the ideal ‘working from home’ scenario I’ve been seeking.

Now I just need to persuade some bosses to employ me from here and I could stay here forever. The phone is the problem. Phoning the UK is not very clear and there’s a bit of a delay – it makes it surprisingly difficult to have a natural conversation – the pause makes you think for a second that they haven’t understood you, or don’t like what you’ve said, and you keep starting talking at the same time as the other person a lot. The conversational rhythm is all off. It’s especially tricky with someone you don’t know and are trying to build up a relationship with.

Anyway, for those of you who don’t know, I work in the nerdy end of the media, otherwise known as science factual television. It’s a freelance world so I do other bits and pieces – writing, mainly. Sometimes I call myself a science communicator, because it covers most of it. But it also sounds totally wanky, so I don’t do it often. And I’ve done lots of non-science stuff, so actually it should just be communicator. Or maybe COMMUNICATOR! Which sounds even wankier.

Random tangent – spellcheck doesn’t recognise wanky or wankier. How superficially prudish modern technology is. Considering that half the traffic on the internet must be porn….

Where was I? Oh yes, digressing pointlessly. So, I’m writing some articles on the technology behind sportswear while I’m here. For a sportswear retail website my friend Liam is doing. I thought it provided a neat answer to the age-old question, ‘How can I save enough money to go travelling when I spend it all as fast as I earn it?’ Hence my occasional references to embroidery or polyester.

Obviously I thought it was a genius plan, not realising I was heading into full-on civil insurrection, military curfews, etc. Poor old Liam has been most forebearing about it all.

Anyway, that’s why I’m working, and that’s why I’m on the internet all the time, and that’s why I’ve adopted the New Orleans. NOW comes the journalist piss-taking promised in the headline.

Because this is the only wi-fi hotspot in Thamel, for a few days, when it was all kicking off, this place was full of journalists. Now remember, this is as much an unreal bubble as the garden at my hotel. One day, checking the UK coverage, I saw an article in The Scotsman about the situation here.

The article was full of gaps and missing the point, and the only local he’d interviewed was ‘The owner of the New Orleans café’. I mean, for fuck’s sake, we can all say hi to Sudesh and ask him how it’s going, I wouldn’t call it thorough research into the Nepalese political situation. Especially not when there are good English language news sources like The Kathmandu Post and ‘United We Blog’, very easily available.

It’s like we were all here, living in one reality, while the journalists were intently constructing their own, far more intrepid one. Sudesh said that one evening the BBC correspondent had been in here, chatting to him. People (including the BBC guy) were sitting about in the sun, drinking beer and laughing. And later on, Sudesh saw him on BBC World, wearing a flak jacket and helmet to make his report and talking about danger and lawless streets.

It’s my theory that everyone in the media watched too much Press Gang when they were younger. But news journalists really haven’t ever grown out of it…

And I don’t mean to say that the whole crisis was media manufactured, it wasn’t at all. We tourists in Thamel were in our insulated little bubble, while outside repression and hardship went on. But even then, people were playing football in the street. There wasn’t a secret policeman outside every home.

And the news coverage often seemed to miss the repression, etc, anyway. They just made it seem like widespread public lawlessness had broken out, and they kept talking about the Maoist insurgency, like that was behind it all. No, that’s what the Palace wants to pretend! And it wouldn’t have been difficult to find out about what the security forces were up to, how people felt and what they were experiencing. You only needed to ask around.

And there are some excellent Nepalese journalists here – people who risked arrest and beatings to report what was happening, and to join the protests. People who WERE beaten and arrested. Why didn’t they go and interview them?

An English girl I met had been interviewed by the Independent journalist, in Northfield Café, across the road. He said he was too frightened to go out of Thamel, so was interviewing people here. My god man, those Nepalese journalists (and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Nepalis) were out there! Why not split your fee with one of them and get them to report in that case? Fear is no excuse for not getting the true story. Not when there are ways round the risks. Although, to be fair, The Independent’s coverage was the best I saw from the British press.

And, to be even more fair, the coverage did improve as the crisis went on. Articles started getting some of the nuances and mentioning some of the background. I suppose once they’d had time to do a bit of research and talk to more people. But does that mean to start with the journalists were people who didn’t know anything about the situation? Don’t they have stringers here? Or at least South Asia correspondents who’d have had a bit of background knowledge?

In my job, I’m expected to have a good background knowledge of science, and be able to talk intelligently about any area. And be able to get to grips with anything in more depth. But when I’m working on something totally new it’ll take me a few days to get up to speed. If I had to write something about a totally new area after half a day I’m sure I would miss loads of important stuff.

But then, that’s what’s wrong with news. News sources want to proffer the authoritative voice, but they don’t fund the expertise to supply it. So ill-prepared generalists write articles full of howlers, but present them as the real story. No-one starts their article, ‘Look, I’ve just got here, and I don’t really know what’s going on, but it looks a bit like…’ but maybe they should.

We’d live in a lot more honest world if people stopped pretending there were these absolutes everywhere (which they have a hotline to!) and admitted what a confusing mess it all is.

And the journalists were mostly OK, as far as I could see. It’s not really their fault. But, for example, me and my new mate Jim were chatting to one of them the other day. Jim came here with Peace Corps five years ago and ended up staying, so he knows the country pretty well, speaks Nepali, etc. He’s cool. Anyway, it turned out the journo hadn’t left Kathmandu at all. Well, that explains the strange Kathmandu focus of the international coverage!

Actually, until the last few days of it, most of the protests were in other cities. There were huge, peaceful rallies in places like Nepalganj, Bakhtapur, Pokhara and loads of other places. There were women’s rallies and all sorts. In fact there has been some muttering about the fact that Kathmanduites had not put their backs into the protests like people in other places have. It’s like Britain, people in London and the Home Counties are cunts, and people other places are a lot more community minded.

Oh whoops, look, sweeping generalisation, so what you gonna do about it?

And, you know, those journalists could have got out of Kathmandu. Buses, etc were stopped, but planes were still running. They could have flown to Pokhara or Nepalganj easily. It’s 20 mins on a plane to Pokhara. Or they could have phoned up local journalists and asked them about it!

Jim also said he’d been watching CNN and the journalist had interviewed a couple of people on the street who were actually Indian, not Nepali. They were presented as if they were local, so he thought maybe the journalist didn’t realise – he’d have been working though a translator, who would speak Hindi too, so he’d probably just translate and not point it out. But how can someone be expected to get to the truth of what’s going on in a country if he can’t tell that the people he’s asking are foreigners?

And this is the coverage that decides world public opinion! And hence the response of the international community. You lot are smart, well-informed and media savvy, what do you suggest we do about it?

Anyway, brief news update

Yesterday’s papers were full of the news that on Wednesday, in Belbari, the Army opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators, killing six people. The people were demonstrating because troops from the barracks had gang-raped a local woman and shot her.

The army’s line is that the woman had broken into the barracks in the middle of the night and the demonstrators were suspected Maoists insurgents. The woman was 22 and had two kids and ran a local guesthouse.

That’s the sort of thing that means the people don’t like the Army and don’t trust them.

Yesterday there was a huge, orderly, gathering in the centre of Kathmandu, addressed by the Seven Party Alliance leaders. Apparently they were saying talking about a roadmap and promising they wouldn’t sell the people out, etc. It’s still going to be a long road to true democracy. The new PM, GP Koirala, is 84 and also tainted by past corruption scandals. Politics here is littered with them.

And, in other news, I have pretty much finished my articles. No more polyester for me! The internet here isn’t working today so I’m going to go now to email them and post this. And then I might head off and see what’s happening everywhere outside this fragrant bubble. Or I might go clothes shopping, we’ll see. It’s roasting hot by the way.

Oh yeah, and a couple of other random things

It's struck me often that the mix of travellers here is very different from a lot of places I've been. There's loads of outdoor types (for obvious reasons), a lot of them older. But they're people you'd rarely meet travelling in India, say. And there's relatively few of the 'normal travellers' that I met a lot in China - round-the-worlders, that kind of thing. I was saying this to someone the other night who'd been here for longer. He said, 'yeah, you get three types of people here, outdoor types, volunteers and hippies'. I am concerned. I think this must mean I'm a hippy. Although I'm possibly in danger of crossing over into 'do-gooder'.

Will someone please remind me, the next time I'm planning to travel anywhere, that I should take more than seven pairs of socks with me? My obsession with trying to pack light means I get to that many socks and pants and go, 'Oh that'll be fine, I can wash them', but actually, having to wash clothes every six days (you're wearing one pair, remember) is a pain. And it's a pretty illogical weight-saving strategy for someone who's packed nine books, two A4 notebooks and a laptop.

Mind you, words are important and socks are easy to buy anywhere...