The Government Line

The hardest thing to change is the mindset of the young journalists here. They believe they are required to read the press releases from the president's office verbatim. There is a VIP camera crew dedicated to shooting video of the president and other top officials, and TVM runs these videos, unedited, during the news in what amounts to an official home movie of the public events in the president's day. This is why I'm told that some cynics refer to TVM as "Television Maumoon."
The president's departure for an environmental conference in New Delhi on Wednesday resulted in a 2 pm news bulletin that consisted mostly of the official video that ran so long the newscaster ran out of copy. So they just continued to run the silent video. This, after we had discussed ways to cover the departure in terms of a reporter package or a VO/SOT. The reporter package missed its feed slot from India, but they didn't think to take the feed of official footage and write their own package back in the newsroom.
That night I checked to make sure I had the authority to change this policy and got a long text message encouraging me to press on. Thursday morning's assignment meeting included another discussion of how to cover the president in New Delhi receiving an award for his efforts to combat global warming. The result... the 2 pm newscast consisted of the newsreader rambling on for 15 pages to read the entire press release with no video. I called everyone in the newsroom together to discuss why this happened. They could see I was pretty steamed. But I could see they truly believed there would be reprisals if they didn't toe the line. So... I made sure they all had my cell number and would promise to call me the next time one of these releases came in. And that is how I made my voiceover debut on TV Maldives! Read on.