Very early one Sunday morning a couple of years back, we were awakened by a huge explosion, obviously quite close by. As it was still dark, there was nothing to be seen outside, so we switched on Sky News. Sure enough, within about five minutes, one of those "breaking news" boxes appeared on the screen: "Large explosion heard in St Albans". Then Sky had what they must have thought was a stroke of luck: one of their reporters was living in the city (yes, St Albans is a city!), and called in with the first "on the spot" report.
The anchor in the studio asked if it was an explosion on the ground. No, the reporter said confidently, he had been in war zones and knew what those sounded like. He had heard a strange noise overhead just before the explosion and was pretty convinced it was an aircraft crash. He sounded so certain about this that you felt that at any moment, he would name the airline, if not the pilot. He was, of course, dead wrong: this was the Buncefield oil depot explosion, the largest blast in peacetime Europe. Within half an hour Sky was starting to get the story straight, and the "on the spot" reporter vanished from the airwaves.
I was reminded of this by BBC News-24's coverage of the factory blaze in East London on Monday. Even though terrorism was almost immediately ruled out, for almost two hours they gave it the sort of wall-to-wall coverage that we all remember from the September 2001 attacks. A helicopter was despatched to the scene, and quickly revealed that most of the "75 firefighters tackling the raging inferno" were in fact standing around in the car park, while about ten of their colleagues trained hoses on the building. (This is not meant as a criticism of the firefighters, who got the blaze under control very quickly, and happily with no injuries or loss of life).
The BBC got a reporter in close to the scene, then started to up the ante. Because the fire was located on a corner of the 2012 Olympic site, the sports reporter was central to the coverage. He called someone at the Olympic Delivery Authority, effectively asking whether this catastrophe would derail their plans to have the Games facilities ready on time. The ODA seemed pretty relaxed about it all, not least because the burning building was due for demolition anyway. The BBC also reported "travel disruptions" in the area. A reporter called Eurostar, who advised that their services were unaffected -- possibly because the nearby High Speed 1 line was not yet in use that day, so all of their trains were on the other side of the river. More promisingly, it emerged that services on the nearby North London Line were suspended -- and as the helicopter camera moved in for a close-up of the stricken line, a passenger train trundled by.
The BBC also reported that the fire had started in a bus depot, which turned out not to be true. Still, there were three bus depots on the same road, so the helicopter focused in on one of them while a reporter contacted the manager of a bus company. His first comment: "That garage in your shot is not ours". So the reporter asked him for his eye-witness account of the explosion. Well, actually, he was in an office on the other side of London, but he was sure it must have been worrying for people close by. It all made you think that Drop the Dead Donkey and Alan Partridge didn't skewer the media hard enough.
By late afternoon the BBC was scarcely mentioning the fire on its news bulletins, so I still have no idea why they initially gave it so much airtime. It's not as if there was nothing else going on at the time: someone took a pop at German Chancellor Merkel, Benazir Bhutto announced she was no longer talking to President Musharraf, and David Cameron announced a new policy initiative on....no wait, maybe that explains it.
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