In Conversation: An interview with Daniel Schweimler

Name: Daniel Schweimler
Born: London, 1962
Lives in: Buenos Aires
Profession: Journalist
Work: British local media, Buenos Aires Herald, BBC, China Central TV (CCTV), freelance.
Education: “Limited!”
Last book read: What is the What? by Dave Eggers
Last film watched: Invictus

Daniel Schweimler is a British journalist who has lived in Argentina since 2006. He began his career in England in local print media but quickly found himself drawn to life beyond Albion. He has been travelling and working in Latin America, he returned to England in 1989, in his own words “penniless,” and began working for the BBC World Service. He then took positions overseas as the BBC’s correspondent for Mexico (1993-1994), Spain (1998-2000) and Cuba (2001-2002). He moved to Argentina permanently in early 2006, as the BBC’s chief South America correspondent. After 19 years at the British broadcaster, he left the BBC to work freelance, contributing to The Economist, Financial Times and The Guardian, and covering UN conferences in Cancun, Durban and Rio. In February 2012, he began reporting for China Central TV (CCTV), covering Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile and Bolivia. He is a supporter of West Ham United and Argentinos Juniors (more on this later) and attends as many games as he can. Daniel lives in Collegiales with his Argentine wife, Claudia, and their two children: Benjamin (15) and Lucas (13).

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Daniel, you’ve have had a long career that’s taken you to many interesting places. Why and how did you get into journalism?

It was something I decided when I was 14,15, it was something I wanted to do. How and why? It’s hard to remember in a way. I always fancied myself as someone who could write, and it turns out writing has little to do with journalism (laughs), I mean, it benefits you but it’s not the place to go if you want to discover yourself as a writer. I did see a couple of films… All the President’s Men I remember… they had a romantic notion of what journalism was about. But as you later find out, your romantic notions are never really based in reality (laughs). But I got into it and I love it. I was always interested in the world too and foreign correspondents. It seemed like a good way to see the world as well and a way to get an ‘in’ into places you wouldn’t normally get access to. The truth is I probably don’t know (laughs)

Once upon a time, you worked for the Herald I believe?

Yeah. I was there in 1989, the time of hyper-inflation in Argentina — we were paid two times a month! It was an interesting time. I was on the international pages and it was a fascinating time in world history… the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Eastern Europe, the invasion of Panama… so every day was fascinating. There was a great joy in doing the news, staggering off to a bar in Plaza Italia and then the next morning seeing our papers on the kiosco. It was history unfolding.

You worked for the BBC for 19 years after that? Is that right?

Yes, Christmas 1989 I went back, y’know, penniless, jobless and they were advertising for staff and producers at the BBC World Service. They’d realised they’d made some mistakes and they needed some Latin American knowledge – they’d called Rio the capital of Brazil twice and things like that and they needed people with fundamental knowledge of Latin America… It was March 1990 I got the job for the BBC. Four times I managed to get the job as Foreign Correspondent abroad. The World Service is a wonderful place to work, it’s this font of knowledge and experience. If you’re doing a story on the collapse of eastern Europe, you would find Romanian dissidents working there. There will be this for mer freedom fighter from Kashmir propping up the bar… it was all information, knowledge and experience, all in Bush House (where the BBC used to be based in London. It was a wonderful place, it sounds a bit corny but the world was there. You couldn’t go there and not know things, you had to have knowledge yourself. It’s intense, it’s a 24-hour operation, 365 days a year, so when stuff happened, there was a good chance you might be on duty. Like when Princess Diana died or Gorbachev was shoved in prison. You might have been there, you remember that shift, it sticks with you.

And later you worked in Mexico, Spain, Cuba and Argentina? You were based in the countries.

Yeah, Mexico first, then Spain, then Cuba, then Argentina. Mexico in those days was at a crossroads (in 1993). It was kind of joining the first world, the economy was doing well, Americans were investing, it joined NAFTA… and then on January 1, 1994, they had the Chiapas uprising. My first real big story. So I got to go down and cover it…

And what was that like? Scary?

A little bit scary, yes. But the demands are so great, you don’t have time to be scared. I was petrified really when I first arrived in Mexico. My Spanish wasn’t great, I had little foreign experience, I didn’t know how the camera they’d given me worked. I remember lying in this room in this apartment in Mexico City and there was a huge map on the wall… Central America, the Caribbean, all these regions I’m meant to be covering and I’m thinking to myself, “How the fuck am I going to do this?” I had no idea. I don’t think I slept for the first two months, I was so nervous. And then you pick it up, you do what you have to do. Chiapas was wonderful in a way because it was a baptism of fire. You had to be there. You make mistakes, the one thing you learnt is to get to the action quickly. Don’t fart around at the edges.

And what about Cuba?

Cuba was very different. It was a much more difficult place to work, because of access to information…

I was going to ask. Do you actually get controlled?

Well, you’re bugged for a start. Everything’s controlled. You know that you’re phone is bugged. You know that your cleaner may well be… well, not spying on you exactly, but they get that job because they work for the Ministry. And the Ministry expects them to tell them stuff.

Do you just accept that?

You have to. I was surprised about the extent to which they followed us around, but perhaps I was a little naive. Basically you are accredited to the Department of Foreign Press, to the Interior Ministry, and everything you do, you do through them. You can’t interview anybody who’s not a dissident or foreign visitors without their permission. Stories evolve there rather than happen. It’s a hard place to live. We had young kids and getting nappies for the kids and all that was very difficult…  a bureaucratic nightmare. But it was never dull. A good place to look back rather than actually being there at the time (laughs).

And what was the hardest gig you had to do in these years?

Well… maybe the Chiapas, that was dangerous but I was naive so I didn’t really realise. The BBC send you on these courses, run by ex-paratroopers and SAS guys in some country house in the UK and they’ll kidnap you and talk you through what to do, what to do if you get kidnapped, what to do if you are in a war situation. Every major media organization has to do it for insurance.

Riots are dangerous here too. In 2001 I was in Cuba and they sent me here for the riots in Plaza de Mayo because I was the “nearest” correspondent. I was here for three weeks and the actual correspondent here had actually gone on leave after the helicoptor left. So I got here, checked in and thought I would wander down to the Plaza de Mayo to get the pulse and I walked straight into a cloud of tear gas. That was hairy but the adrenaline gets you through. And anyway, that’s what you’re living for… well, not so much nowadays. Actually, just taking a bus in Lima is probably the most dangerous thing you can do in Latin America (laughs)… maybe crossing the road in La Paz (laughs).

And you were South America correspondent from 2006-2009?

Yeah, ‘09 that came to an end and it was a case of either going back to London or taking redundancy. The kids were at school, my wife is Argentine, so I left the BBC after 19 years. So in 2009 to 2011 I was freelancing and I did a bit of everything, for the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Economist, some produced production work for a company making a film on the barrabravas. Bits and pieces. And then the Chinese came along at the end of 2011 with the elections here and they were looking to start up an English-language branch of CCTV…

So you’ve done a bit of everything really… radio, TV, print…

Yes and increasingly online too! TV was often the thing I did less of then, but it’s quite nice to concentrate on that now. There’s more and more work, they’re expanding. There’s two of us, myself and Joel and we work with a local film production company.

And circumstances allow it to be done a lot easier now too…

Yeah, cameras are smaller, cameras are versatile… you can edit… I mean the night of Cristina’s election (in 2011), we edited our piece in a cafe off the Avenida de Mayo! Recorded the voice track in a car, in the back of a taxi, got to the cafe, ordered some beers and pizza and we sent it from there, we sent the finished piece!

That’s amazing!

You can do that now. You have to have a good wifi connection but apart from the kit.. that’s all you need!

What are your thoughts on journalism today? You lent me a book a while ago about journalism, Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, which was great, I found incredibly well-researched yet also mildly depressing…

I think there’s plenty of room to be optimistic about journalism. With the new technology, Davies didn’t really go into that. With the institutions, the BBCs and that are turning into dinosaurs as they’re too slow-moving, but some guy with an iPhone and a camera can do some great reporting…

But the problem is checking… It’s like translations, there’s an assumption that everything’s translated correctly. But when (Jose) Mujica called Cristina (Fernandez de Kirchner) a bad word a few months back, we had five different ways to translate the word, and every word has different connotations.

Sure, yeah, that’s a good example. What’s funny for me is I see stuff that I wrote 10, 12 years ago and it goes online and it gets recycled and recycled and next thing you know, you find yourself being quoted on Wikipedia! And you think, I might have had a really bad day, what if what I wrote wasn’t correct? And then it becomes history.

And the effect of technology on journalism?

I think what’s happening more and more is people are specialising because of the new technology. For example, there have been a few of these climate change conferences lately and you go there and there are 3-, 4-, 5-person operations which are running online, with video and they report only on the environment. And you have to be specialist, you have to be good at what you do. The only people reading it are the people interested in it, but they know what it’s about and if you get it wrong, you will soon be picked up on it. The industry is moving, it’s changing, it’s a maleable force… but y’know, journalism is not dead, it’s just changing quickly and fundamentally more than it ever has done. And I think the old guys, people my age (laughs), are struggling to live with the change. But then the fundamentals of journalism are still there, they’re the same — good writing, asking the right questions… you still need people who know what they’re talking about. The technology will always change, but these principles remain the same.

I believe that too. I believe in good writing, but it’s time… the time that journalists have to turn over a story these days is not the same as it was.

Yeah, it depends. That is the problem. You go out and research a story in the Amazon, say, and no one’s going to fork out the cash up front to see you through the three or four weeks you need.

I think another issue is training too. When I first started I was taught the job and they made me do the things you have to do. I had to go door-knocking and everything, lots and lots of interviews, and most journalists now have not had that training and they don’t know how to manage people and situations…

Well, my generation at the BBC they started taking people from the graduate training courses, people who knew the theory very well, went to Oxford, Cambridge etc. They were crap journalists! They were great writers, and they were good analysts, but they weren’t very good at getting in there. They all became middle managers, not very good with people y’know! I always think, is I have a strength, it’s that I can sit down with (Jose) Mujica and chat with him because I need him to be at ease…

Well, you need him to open up.

Exactly. And that skill I learned through many, many, interviews on the Ilford Recorder in east London! But yeah, you’re right, that’s disappeared. It’s a shame in a way, but again, no one wants to hear that.

There are terrible things happening in journalism too. I think the centralization of information. Technology is getting better, more flexible, cheaper, so in theory we should have more foreign correspondents dotted everywhere, yet what we are seeing is less and less foreign correspondents. What we’re seeing is more centred on Jerusalem, Moscow, Washington, London, Nairobi… which are already seats of power. These big organizations, the CNNs, the BBCs, the Reuters, these are shrinking, especially in Latin America, and the technology should be revolutionizing these places, but that’s not what we’re seeing.

Why is that do you think?

I don’t know. I’ve thought about it and talked to so many people about it. Y’know every time I talk to someone in London about the lack of Latin American coverage, they say they are interested and they say they would read more of it if it was there. I think the commissioning editors do what they know, e.g. Washington. A good story out of Ecuador, for example, they don’t get it, they don’t know the context. You have to be doing stories regularly.

And what about Argentine journalism?

There’s more and more focus on Buenos Aires. Look at the elections for example, Argentina is this huge, fascintating, diverse country and I don’t see it in the Argentine media. We’ve been lucky enough to have someone finance us to get out in the country and got some incredible stuff. Argentinians live in this amazing country but they don’t know about it. They go to the same places on holiday, Mar del Plata, Punta del Este, Miami… they should be exploring their own country, as should the rest of the world. Iguazu is fantastic but there’s more to Argentina. That’s a journalistic problem, not just a tourism problem. There doesn’t seem to be an appetite in Clarín or La Nación to report on what’s going on in say, Chaco. But this isn’t just an Argentine problem, it’s a world problem.

And what about the government and its relationship to journalists?

In any democracy, you want as much openness and access to people as possible. And I think the polarisation of the media here is a problem. Lots pro, lots against and no one in the middle. It’s a country of analysts, journalists are analysts rather than journalists. And I think that is a problem. But the reaction to that is the alternative media. We read a magazine called Mu at home and it’s a radical, alternative, environmental magazine. It has a political slant of course. I still read La Nación too as my paper of choice, although politically I’m nowhere close to it.

You’re now a freelance reporter and you work for the Chinese company CCTV. What do you cover for them? What kind of stories are the Chinese audience interested in?

Anything, certainly a lot of economy. Chinese investment. There’s great curiosity in China. We are curious about them as they open up to the world and they are very curious about the rest of the world. They feel they have a lot to learn. They want to know where they are investing. Initially they came here to find out about their investment, but now they want to know about the football, about tango, about the polo, about maté, they want to know everything. We transmit mainly to an American audience in (Washington) DC, but they Chinese get the material too. Really, if we find it interesting we do it.

So recently, we were up North in Chaco Formosa with the indigenous population covering that. The problem up there is soya fields, indigenous rights, lack of water etc. We interviewed Jose Mujica at the weekend too, that was interesting.

How did that come about? Was it a case of hassling them?

Well, we asked basically yeah. We kept asking his press officer, and eventually it came good. We kept reminding them we were interested. Also, there’s Chinese investment there and the Mercosur stuff.

And what kinds of things did you discuss with him?

Oh, everything. We spoke about Latin American solidarity after the Evo Morales/Snowden incident. Chinese investment, the Mercosur. It turned out he’d been to China in the ‘60s and met Mao-Tse-Tung as part of a student delegation. We spoke about the difficulties of being a small country overshadowed by Argentina and Brazil.

And him personally?

Amiable. Fascinating. Really normal, in a world where media and press officers take over. That’s what he’s known for. He was a great, a natural. He lives in his own tumble-down farm on the outskirts. He gives 90 percent of his wages to charity, he drives around in a Volkswagen second-hand Beetle. He doesn’t care about the money, he’s 78 years-old, his wife’s a senator, he has more than enough to live on, the state drives him everywhere. When we turned up, we were at the president’s country retreat waiting around, and he came out personally, all stooped over, he is 78 after all, in his old sweatshirt and he says, “Hola, que tal?” He cracks a joke, he was really nice. I can’t imagine that kind of reception from most other presidents… and that in a way is what makes the job interesting. It was a pleasure. And the material, the questions, he actually thought about them and answered them properly. It wasn’t controversial or anything but he had thought about these subjects. He spent 14 years in jail, he’s a bit like Mandela like that, he had time to think about his politics and why he thinks that way. There are parallels to Mandela, the country’s are hugely different, but they were involved in armed struggles, both came out of president to lead their country. He had a lot of substance, his press guy told us afterwards that what he loves doing is stirring debate. He wants to get people talking. He said on abortion for example, “Who likes abortion?” But it’s an issue and backstreet abortions are a problem. He’s being pragmatic.

Do you miss anything about Britain, now you’ve been here a while?

A bit. Not much. The sense of humour, the radio – although I can get that now. Teabags. Good beer. I’ve often found it strange when you go to someone’s house and they say “What do you want, coke or fanta?” I always answer, “Has the kids party started already?” I’m a bloody grown up, I am of the age where I can drink alcohol! Good chocolate. A few Yorkie bars would be nice. What do you miss?

Pub culture.

Oh yes, I agree with that. Top of the list. To go to the pub after work. Lovely. Get my own pint and a packet of crisps. Lovely.

Last time I saw you, you were talking about a blog you run, Hand of Dan. Tell us a little what that’s about?

Yeah, I started it in 2009, the Apetura season in 2009 when I was working freelance. It’s a blog exploring Argentine culture through football. I’m interested in football and I thought it would be an interesting way to tell the story of Argentina, relate everyday stories. And I chose to do it from the terraces. I chose them because they were easy to get to, they had loose parallels with West Ham United, they’re a humble team. I went to every Argentinos Juniors game at home and as many away as I could that season. And the following season too, when Argentinos Juniors were Champions. I deliberately chose a crappier team as In thought it would be funnier and then they bloody end up Champions in the second season I’m covering them. Some of the people I see on the terraces started thinking I was a lucky charm! I go less frequently now, mostly due to work. It had a good following though, here and abroad. About 30,000 hits a month. And it got me work because some people would come looking for someone who knew something about Argentine football.

You once filmed and produced a documentary on football violence in Argentina, yes? How did you go about this?

It was an independent British production company making a documentary about football violence around the world. I helped them with the Argentine company. We filmed, found people and interviewed barra brava.

And how was that? Were the fans ‘welcoming’?

They were good, really good. They were fine, happy to be on camera. They were saying it’s just a family thing, we help the club. But they would talk about the clashes with the police and police brutality and the violence. The violence in England in the ‘70s and ‘80s was very different, here it has political connections. The club presidents need the barra brava to stay in office and it has got out of control, there’s no doubt about it, without a willingness to tackle the problem.

Do you think the AFA are making any impact on this problem?

No. Almost none. If anything their lack of activity means they’re encouraging the barra brava to get ever more out of control. It’s power. People, presidents rely on them to stay in office and when someone tries to break that link, they get almost no support. There are so many vested interests. While the game as a whole suffers.

And finally, I wanted to ask you about bringing up bilingual children… is that easy or hard?

I think if you are consistent with rules and regulations in the home, it’s easy. I only speak to them in English and Claudia only speaks to them in Spanish. Right from the very beginning, before birth. And it’s worked. They’re bilingual, no accent in either language… obviously when the four of us are together, there’s a mishmash of languages… our own family Spanglish, if you like! One thing I will say for here, it’s a great place to bring up kids. Socially, educationally it’s fantastic and it’s quite safe. It’s not a bad place at all.

An abridged, edited version of this full-length interview was published in the Buenos Aires Herald, on Thursday, July 18, 2013.
Link: http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/136330/journalism-is-not-dead-it’s-just-changing-quickly.
© J. GRAINGER, 2013