VIP Crew Problems

With all the concern about election fairness, it's hard to understand why TVM has the "VIP crew" whose only job is to cover the president's every move in a way that glorifies him and, in the opinion of our team, makes him appear like a dictator. See earlier post about our meeting with President Gayoom, in which we discovered that he wishes to project the appearance of a modern democratic leader. Not surprising considering the upcoming election.

The photographer and editor on the VIP team are not available to cover actual news, so we often have the situation where there are no camera crews available for a day-of-air story, while the VIP crew sits around watching movies in their nicely equipped avid editing suite, shown above. Again, this editing room is only for presidential coverage by this special crew. Meanwhile, TVM reporters wait in line for the two or three editing rooms available to them and deal with overworked, broken equipment.

The presidential footage is clearly propaganda, even to the point of only shooting the president from his "good side." It is one continuous shot with no cutaways and intended to be shown in its entirety, not edited for news stories. Our team has recommended reassigning this crew where it belongs: in the presidential press office. News coverage of the president should be done by independent journalists and when "official footage" is used it should be clearly labeled as such. TVM will need a couple of additional field crews to cover the president and opposition candidates fairly.

In the meantime, we are having a hard time figuring out how many photographers really work for TVM News. We think there might be a total of four, although two of them don't come to work very often. The programming department seems to have an unlimited supply of cameramen for staged events such as "youth day" or a soccer match, but when we need a crew for a story there's rarely anyone around. In the morning meeting, we don't know how many crews -- if any -- will be available that day, so it's impossible to make assignments, or as they call them here, "shootings."