Andy Man

Firing a few home truths at the world as reported by the media in contrast to the world he actually encounters on his travels, broadcaster and rough rider foreign correspondent Andy Kershaw said he felt...

"A certain amount of irritation with what other people prioritise as newsworthy. We have a preponderence of news experts telling us what needs to be done, but they haven't a clue about how the economy works...It does leave you with a different sense of perspective, priorities and perceptions."

An example of this dichotomy between ignorance and experience is to be found in his report from earthquake-hit Haiti, published by The Independent in January 2010, in which he takes to task aid agencies, the military and the BBC's Matt Frei:-

The alarmingly unanimous priorities of the spokesmen and women of aid organisations and the military, have been with "issues" (for they love that word) of "security", "procedures" and "logistics" (what we used to call "transport" or "trucks"). These obsessions indicate not only a self-serving and self-important carrerist culture among some, though not all, aid workers (although wide experience of the profession in Haiti and across Africa tells me it is more common than donors would like to think), but the magnitude of the crisis has paralysed them into gibbering force of box-tickers. Most worryingly, it reveals that many - even selfless - NGO workers on the ground haven't a clue about the country and its people...

An unbelievable 10,000 charities were already working in Haiti when the earthquake rocked the island, most of them tiny independent organisations. Humanitarian aid is, almost by definition, never where it is needed when natural disasters strike. But, in Haiti, what's been needed has ben flown in with impressive speed. Yet the combined concern of all those organisations - many of them regarding fellow charities as professional rivals - has so far been unable to get that assistance a ride from the airport. Too much energy in the last week has been expended on bickering about procedure and the fetish about "security".

The assumption that there is a security threat has gone completely unchallenged by an army of foreign press, equally unfamiliar with Haiti and the character of the Haitians. Indeed, TV reporters particularly, having exhausted the televisual possibilities of rubble, have been talking up "security", "unrest" and "violence" when all the available evidence would indicate anything but.

Astonishingly, among these TV dramatists, I am sorry to say, is the BBC's Matt Frie. An incongruously ample figure around Port-au-Prince, Frei has been working himself up all week into what is now a state of near hysteria about "security" and the almost non-existent state of "violence"...

My intention is not to malign at second-hand the journalistic reputation of Matt Frie, whose two-part television documentary about Berlin I eagerly bought, but to draw attention to the reality disparity between life as we know it and life as it is reported.

Look at the news today. Britain, we are told as though for the very first time, may be closer to double-dip recession than anyone allowed. Germany may actually let Greece default on its debt repayments. Cor blimey, gov, who'd 'ave thought it!!!!????

In response to all the bad news coming at us from Aix to Ghent, as it were, the FTSE100 quietly zonks up by 70-odd points, Subway announces the creation of 600 new UK outlets and 6,000 new jobs in the coming year, and graduate pay is about to rise by four per cent for the first time since God knows when.

Although I do not wander among the rubble of my country, unlike the Haitians Andy Kershaw saw two years ago, I sometimes feel that the doom-mongers, the Apocalypso Now prophets, as I once described them, won't be truly fulfilled until the highest tower falls - but not on them, of course.

As for the tottering state of euroland, the collapse of that political misconception is probably necessary although I am under no illusion that the defenders of this man-made disaster will learn anything from it. As the author of the Horrible History series, Terry Deary, said to me recently: "I think what underlies Horrible Histories is the goodness of ordinary people as opposed to the evil and stupidity of people in power."