Clark Kent I ain't...

IT'S not unusual for me to be known to shout at the television.

There are a number of things that can make me raise my voice and start gesticulating like a mad woman.

Paula Abdul telling someone on American Idol they look nice, when she should be judging them on their singing ability.

Horatio Caine on CSI:Miami stopping mid-sentence yet again to remove his sunglasses for effect.

Xander getting away with something stupid for the 6,000th time on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But what really stirs the inner lunatic is the fictional portrayal of reporters.

As if we didn't have to put up with enough stereotyping and bad press, excuse the pun.

I remember one particular example that shot my blood pressure to new levels.

Younger readers, bear with me.

Back when Eastenders was required watching, there was a character called Polly Becker, who was, and I use the term loosely, an "investigative reporter".

She's certainly like none I've ever known, seeing as how her big scoop was about one married character having an affair and the subsequent drama around his infidelity.

Woah! Big news - not! In real life, this sort of thing would never get near a newspaper, certainly not a regional one.

If we wrote about all the affairs going on in our towns, we'd have no room left for the real news!

The only film I can remember watching with a positive portrayal of reporters is The Paper, but then the whole thing's set in a newsroom, so it should be pretty accurate.

We're either whiter than white with super powers (Clark Kent) or scurrilous and morally bankrupt.

The only super powers I have are managing to get up to 100wpm shorthand on a regular basis.

It's probably national journalists who give us all a bad name - they have a very different approach to what they do.

It's easy for them to breeze into an area, upset everyone, then disappear back to Canary Wharf.

For us, the reality is very different.

Apart from the fact that we genuinely care about our communities and want to do right by them, it just wouldn't be worth our while upsetting people with sensationalism and untruths.

We have to come back into work the next day and face our contacts again - if we don't deal with them correctly, they just stop talking to us.

In our newsroom we pride ourselves on following the mainstays of good journalism.

We always give both sides of the story, we never print something someone told us off the record and we never break an embargo.

It's why people respect what we do - despite the negative images they've normally been bombarded with.

~ Emma Ray