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Painful memories

Tim McCoy | 12:37 UK time, Tuesday, 7 August 2007

When we heard about the outbreak of foot and mouth on Friday evening, it was clearly going to be big news - most of us vividly remember reporting the devastation and suffering caused by the disease in .

³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ News 24 logoIn the early stages of breaking news, when camera crews are heading to the scene, we relied in part on a lot of phone and studio interviews to tell the story. And producers dug out library pictures of the 2001 outbreak to play during these interviews.

The trouble was, even though they were labelled as library pictures, their repetitive use began to annoy some parts of the audience and they told us. Some thought they were distressing. Some thought they created the impression that 2007 would be a repeat performance of the last time around.

It's an easy trap for us to fall into - after all we're television and we use pictures to tell stories. But in this case you told us that we're weren't thinking carefully enough about the effect these pictures were having.

Of course they do have a place in the unfolding story and we shouldn't blank out the painful memories. So to those who were annoyed, I'm sorry, but we did listen and on Saturday we took steps to limit the use of the library footage to very specific examples.

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