Radio Australia Today Editorial

Air New Zealand Crash and Mumbai Bombings

28 November 2008

Something big always breaks when I’m on holidays. I just didn’t expect to be in an affected newsroom when such an event happens.

So here I am on holidays in New Zealand. I dropped by my friends at Radio New Zealand in Wellington this morning to shoot the breeze. It’s been eleven years since I’ve seen my Radio New Zealand comrades, and I was looking forward to being with them again, and having a fun time.

I’m standing outside the Morning Report studio, ready to go in to have a live on-air chat when the confirmation comes through that five New Zealanders were on the Air New Zealand plane that went down in the Mediterranean off south-west France.

While television here in NZ was reporting that there might have been New Zealanders on board the plane (which had been leased to a German company), the stations were saying that Air New Zealand was unaware of any such details.

So it was a pretty emotional time here when the CEO of Air New Zealand called a media conference to confirm that yes, five New Zealanders were on the plane, one of them an Air New Zealand pilot, three of the airline’s engineers and one from the NZ Civil Aviation Authority. Two Germans were also on board.

Combine this with the news of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it was an extraordinary day for any newsroom, let alone a newsroom in New Zealand.

There was certainly a feeling of shock in the newsroom as the Air NZ CEO made his statements. In one short period we went from the possibility of one of his country-people being on the plane, to a confirmation that as many as five could have perished. As I write this, the news has come through that the French Coast Guard has said that there is no hope of finding any survivors. This has not been confirmed by Air New Zealand at this moment, but it doesn’t look good. There are also reports that two bodies have been found.

Newsroom people spring into action when news like this breaks, and that’s what happened here at Radio New Zealand. Journalists are trained for such things but, as an observer watching reporters cover an event which so closely affects them, you notice how they go just that bit more quietly, how subtley they lose their ebullience. After years of covering local tragedies for radio and TV myself, I’ve never been aware of these slight changes in the feeling of a newsroom. It’s just confirms that journalists are not all that hardened.

They are people, and they get affected by what is going on around them.
Because they’ve got a job to do, and they do it, doesn’t mean they don’t care. We’ve got to remember that.

– Phil