How can a bloody journalist liberate Afghanistan for gods sake. Oh no, this thread is poor, it won't do, next you'll be telling us 'It was John Simpson what won it'.
If we're going to talk about The Sun, I must mention the dreadful bias of Sky's paper review, last night.
Brunson, ITN's old political ed. was doing the review along with the two presenters. When he started critisising one of The Sun's reports, they jumped on him and defended the paper at every opportunity. They might want to have a lovely picture of Rupert on their new video wall...
I think from a broadcasting perspective the BBC probably did liberate Kabul, but certainly not from a military and political one. The BBC was always going to have the advantage in this war, simply because the conditions for them were just right.
If you think about previous wars, CNN did well in the Gulf because it was... CNN. There was only Sky News to rival it in 1991, and Sky hadn't even established overseas bureau by 1991, so they didn't stand a hope in hell. In Kosovo, well, it's within Sky territory, if that makes sense. It's near part of a region that Sky was originally designed to cover, and that it marketed itself at. This time around the BBC have been lucky in having the World Service's reputation to fall back on. They wouldn't have been allowed to send in two correspondents to Kabul if the WS wasn't so respected in that part of the world.
AL
alekf
Yeah, Simpson's reporting was amazing. They showed a lot of it on ABC's World News Tonight and I saw the whole report on World News on BBC America. That's definitely a journalistic coup.
its just a little alarming to note that John Simpson obviously felt that he
was
instrumental in the end of the conflict. In fact I noted from his two-way on the ten o'clock news last night that he seems still to be overawed by the fall of Kabul, and very much caught up in the emotion of it. Perhaps that explains his comments.
