“The Mechanics of How We Bear Witness”: W. T. Stead’s Lessons for Ireland

Abstract

A recent BBC television miniseries The Hour treated its audience to the tantalizing vision of imagining what the news might have looked like if W. T. Stead had been reincarnated as a journalistic visionary working in mid-twentieth-century London. Set in 1956, a moment marking the end of the British Empire’s global influence and the dawn of new journalistic practices with television, The Hour features a leading character, Freddie Lyon (played by Ben Whishaw), who embodies both the brilliance and foolhardy idealism of Stead; like Stead’s investigative journalism in the Pall Mall Gazette, Freddy’s journalistic zeal imperils his television news program “The Hour” along the way. In the first episode of the series, Lyon clarifies what distinguishes his image of the news from what the BBC had practiced in the past. In opposition to staid, safe topics and artificial presentations that kept the sound boom and the investigative journalist out of the frame, Lyon promoted, instead, “the mechanics of how we bear witness: that’s what we [journalists] do; what one tries to do. For fleeting moments of history … Putting real journalists in front of the camera.”1