Finding the changing faces
Updated on 04 November 2008
Andrew Thomas explains how More4 News took a different approach to the US election coverage.
Returning my hire car to San Francisco airport, the clerk gave me a funny look when I said I was catching a flight to Salt Lake City. "You a Mormon?"
Changing planes in Salt Lake City, the Delta Airlines representative looked shocked when I told him my onward destination was Rock Springs, Wyoming. "You ever been there before? They're a funny people out there. Good luck."
In Rock Springs, the hotel receptionist looked shocked when I asked for directions to Pinedale. "Interstate 80, then two hours north on the 191. But why are you going there?"
To each I gave what I hoped was a wry smile. For the more people were puzzled about the places I was heading and the people I'd be seeing, the more confident I became that I was going the right way.
The US presidential election will be decided by the swing states. Eight or nine or nine of them, where a small but decisive group - those who voted for Republican George Bush in 2004 but could be persuaded to take a punt on a black Democrat in 2008 - will decide not just the US presidency but the political and economic direction of the western world.
Those voters are the important ones; those states where the vast majority of the media coverage directed, and voices heard.
Telephone numbers on obscure web-sites had me speaking to famers in the Rockies one minute and porn barons in LA the next.
At More4 News, though, we like to be different. But how to distinguish ourselves from the tsunami of US political coverage?
Our answer - to seek out a small group of people in the safe states, choosing them not because they were undecided or wavering, but because, between them, they represented the broad spectrum of US society. Uninterrupted, uninterrupted and deliberately without context, these would be our voices from America - our Changing Faces.
I spent three afternoons and evenings in London with a notepad, the internet and a phone. Seven people to choose from over three hundred million, with no real criteria as to how to whittle them down. An embarrassingly easy task - or one as difficult as picking a favourite cloud.
I wanted chalk and cheese personified: the straw-chewing cowboy from Diddlesquat, Wyoming, the ballroom dancer from the queerest part of America, the porn star and prude.
Telephone numbers on obscure web-sites had me speaking to famers in the Rockies one minute and porn barons in LA the next. Then a telephone treasure hunt. By last Sunday, a rough list - a starting point for an odyssey of seldom-heard voices.
I wanted these interviews to feel different to anything else you'd see on other programmes about the American election. These people should have characters as well as views.
Once in America, how to present them? I wanted these interviews to feel different to anything else you'd see on other programmes about the American election. These people should have characters as well as views. Their contributions should be allowed to breathe.
Trickiest of all for a reporter who - I'll admit it - likes to dance around in front of the camera and take the ingredients of interviews to form a tasty pie of reportage, they should be barely contextualised, ingredients best consumed raw.
I had, if I'm honest, an inauspicious start. Straight off the plane from London, as the sun set into the San Francisco fog, I drove to a Harley Davidson franchise to interview a female motorbike enthusiast. It wasn't a Triumph.
In my head I hadn't quite sorted out what I was trying to achieve with these interviews. She used biker language to enthuse, but never really explained what it was about Obama that stoked her engine.
But by the second interviewee, though, a bounty hunter, the template began to work. I let the interviewees speak freely and fully, questioning only to kick-start the conversation.
With each there was a deep-seated reason for their choice - an attachment to guns because waving one had saved his son, an admiration for Sarah Palin - mother - that drove a hardened sheep rancher to the point of tears, a man's wish to marry a man, and the desire by a porn actress to be as seen as something but.
On election day, these are More4's changing faces of America.
