Minder

With the bulky, heavy helmet for the film strapped on, I was inside a fully immersive virtual world. With de la Peña playing minder and holding a tether which prevented me from bumping into walls, I somehow ended up inside the news story.

The twenty-eight journalists who sailed with the task force were accompanied by seven censors or 'minders' from the MoD, as well as by military press officers attached to each unit.

Once again the employers, now closely gripped by Central Government minders, offered 4 % now and 7 % in one year's time, and all tied to modernisation. This was not what the FBU had bargained for. So the strike started.

Pieter Tans, a 20-year National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employee, was told not to use the phrase 'climate change' in paper titles and abstracts for the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference. When an official flew in from Washington to be present for an interview Tans gave to the BBC, Mr. Tans wondered why a U.S. government “minder”, reminiscent of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, was required.

Rear Admiral John Woodward, the operational commander, summarized the instructions to the six MoD minders as “co-operation, yes; information, no.”

Throughout Greene's writing he repeatedly refers to dodging government control in Liberia, first by entering the country incognito and then by completing his journey without government minders.

[…] some other journalists were becoming "embedded" with the military as one way of reporting from the front: living with the military, […] and reporting under military restrictions. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, embedded reporters tended to adopt the perspective of their hosts and minders, as US journalist Gordon Dillow later admitted […]

Was she really ill? Was she really a patient? We will never know. Suddenly, it was time to go and our minders were herding us back onto the bus.