Adele Ferguson - Reporters, photographers sometimes encounter hostility

ONCE TV NEWS anchor Anderson Cooper got beat up in Iraq, I noticed the other TV big shots moved their base of operations to places like Jordan and Afghanistan.

I don’t blame them. Here in America, we think anybody representing the media is a protected species, presumed to be on the scene for the news, not to exhibit any bias.

But that was in the old days, before the people rioting in the streets had access to the news 24 hours a day. Now that they do, the ones out to dump Mubarak don’t like reading or hearing that the U.S. is a longtime ally. The ones out to save him don’t like the Obama administration advising them that Mubarak’s resignation is needed.

I’ve had a few instances when I wished desperately that I was someplace else covering a story than where I was at the time.

National political conventions of either party aren’t always fun. I was in Chicago where the cops and the Democratic delegates were fighting in the streets. Not the old time Democrat delegates who stayed in their hotel rooms but the young ones out to raise hell. I took the authorities’ advice not to go out alone.

I went to Miami three or four times and I don’t remember which party it was but there was a lot of tear gas thrown around. One night I was anxious to get back to my hotel but I would have had to hang around another hour or two to ride the bus provided for the Washington delegation and press.

THEN I HEARD John Komen of KING-TV say he and his cameraman didn’t want to wait either and were going to walk back to the hotel. I forget how far it was but I was young then and had a lot of miles in me so I didn’t care. I asked John if I could go with them and, he said sure so we set out through clouds of tear gas and people running all over the place. It wasn’t the safest place to be but it happens that John’s cameraman was about 6 feet 5 inches tall and built like a refrigerator. A trim refrigerator, that is, not fat. We marched through small groups looking for a fight, but not with us. Not with that big bruiser leading the way.

Another time, I was sent out to Kitsap Lake where we had been told a sailor had drowned. When my cameraman and I got there, we found a whole lot of really drunk sailors and I guess we’d have been all right except when we started asking questions The drunk sailors, many of them crying over the loss of their buddy, surrounded us and told us to get the hell out of there. They were physically pushing us to our car when a retired Navy man who was a businessman in our city broke it up and we left without harm or story or pictures. My editor wrote the Navy complaining about how we were treated.

SPEAKING OF CRYING, I was at the scene when the Point No Point fishing resort burned to the ground on the northeastern point of Kitsap. I was carrying a camera but a man I didn’t know came up to me and warned me not to take any pictures of the resort owner who was standing looking at his business go up in smoke and sobbing. I got the message.

Once I covered a meeting near Holly of brushpickers who were in a big snit over something and were making plans to tip over the cars of the people they were mad at, presumably other brush pickers. Then somebody asked me what I was doing there. I said just getting the story. The scene suddenly got very cold indeed. I had my husband with me, but we were vastly outnumbered. I chickened out and offered the fact that I picked brush myself once in awhile. I’m not sure they believed it but the meeting was suddenly over and we got out of there as fast as we could. I wrote about it. I forget how it all turned out except that no cars were tipped over.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansvi1le, Wa., 98340.)