Politics roundup



Welcome to my first “politics roundup”. As well as the more personal entries I thought I would use this blog to engage my political brain and pull together some stories in the news that caught my attention. This may be due to the politics itself, how it was reported or how it made me think differently on an issue.

I have always wanted to do something like this but have never really tried so please bear with me and I will try my best. The other more personal blogs will continue so if you don't care for this, feel free to skip and only read the others.


The 2am Trump wake up call


I’d like to start with one story that caught my eye as an aspiring journalist. This story provided a sneak peak into the demanding nature of the career. During the summer veteran BBC journalist Gary O'Donoghue was woken up at 2am by Donald Trump calling. Now I don’t think many people would be expecting this but for O'Donoghue this was what he had been waiting for. In a panic he grabbed his recorder but in the haste he accidentally hung up. Eventually the phone call was reconnected and the 20 minute interview underwent. The interview that followed was played in full on the 1pm BBC news. The conversation consisted of different topics but most significantly the conversation surrounded Putin and Trump's negotiations in the Ukraine/Russia war. Trump said he was disappointed in Putin but wasn’t giving up.

Now from my perspective having listened to the full interview on the 1pm news, the context of the interview was interesting but what stood out more was the role in which the journalist played. Not only was he woken up at 2am he also had to interview one of the most prominent political figures we have today. It highlighted to me that in my future career path no matter what the time of day you have to be prepared to go. This both excites and scares me which is exactly why I think journalism is the right career for me.

Seat 11A - true safety or myth ?

Throughout the summer I have been lucky enough to have been on a fair few flights. A few have been delayed and a few have taken way longer to get to the destination than was once thought. However on a recent flight I was sitting in the emergency exit row and two stories of separate flight crashes were clear in my brain. In both cases there was one sole survivor. In the Air India disaster Ramesh Viswash Kumar and in a crash in Thailand James Loychusak. Now what links these two people and what had me thinking was that they were both sitting in seat 11A.

Of course, it has been found by experts that there is no single ‘safest’ seat on a plane - it depends on a lot of factors as my aeronautical engineering boyfriend would also most likely tell me… However when I sat in the emergency exit window I couldn't help but think if seats were found to be statistically safer, would I pay extra? Especially when I rarely if ever decide to pay the extra few pounds to sit next to my friends or family.

UK-France ‘one in, one out’ Migration deal

This summer while revising for an interview I had to study the news more than I usually do. One story came to mind when prepping for the question “how would you report differently on a story”. The story itself is a very political migration deal that the UK and French governments were at the time in conversation about. Most of us will have seen it on the news, the new treaty to manage small boat crossings. In what is being called a ‘one in, one out’ scheme.This treaty became law on 4th August. Under the deal people who come into the UK illegally can be detained and returned to France while Britain will accept an equal number of asylum applicants through a legal route with the proper documentation. There were detentions from the start with the earliest being 6th August and over 100 migrants have been detained since then.

What struck me as someone who wants to write about underreported stories were the voices we are losing in the reporting of the deal. Although I understand that many people involved will not want to speak about their experience, what is unfortunately happening is reducing migrants' stories to numbers, not individuals. Headlines like 100 detained and X amount of crossing stopped limit the experience of individuals to statistics. We are losing the human faces and stories of what is potentially life changing displacement.

So that was my first politics roundup: one story about the unpredictable life of a journalist, one about how I have been thinking about the safety of flights and one about the human stories of migration.

I aim to keep doing these roundups as and when stories interest me. If there is something you would like me to dig into in the next roundup, let me know.

Rosie x

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