In February 1996 Nik Gowing was
appointed a main programme anchor for the BBC’s 24-hour international TV
news and information channel BBC World, produced by BBC News for a global
audience of 169 million in 220 countries.
From 1996 to March 2000 Nik was principal anchor for the ninety-minute
premium weekday news programme ‘The World Today’, and its predecessor
‘NewsDesk’. He has been a founding presenter of ‘Europe Direct’
and has been a guest anchor on both ‘HardTalk’ and ‘Simpson’s
World’. He is now a main presenter on the news programmes re-launched in
April 2000. Separate from his BBC work Nik’s skills as a moderator and
conference chair are also in demand for corporate or institutional
conferences, whether on- or off-the-record.
Just after 1 a.m. on August 31 1997, Nik was called in from home after
reports that Princess Diana had been seriously injured in a car accident
in Paris. For five hours he broadcast live on the unfolding drama. BBC
World’s coverage was accessed by scores of broadcasters around the world.
It is estimated that his announcement of Diana’s death just after 5 a.m.
was made to an audience of up to half a billion people.
Nik Gowing’s appointment draws both on his extensive reporting
experience over two decades in diplomacy, defence and international
security and his presentation / chairing skills. BBC World drew on these
skills throughout the Kosovo crisis from March to June 1999. Nik was a
principal programme anchor for the channel’s extended 24-hour/7-day week
coverage of the crisis.
Before joining the BBC, Nik was a correspondent and presenter at ITN for
18 years. From 1989-1996 he was Diplomatic Editor for the one-hour nightly
news analysis programme Channel Four News from ITN in London . His
reports were aired frequently by the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS,
NBC’s SuperChannel and CNN International. His reporting from Bosnia was
part of the Channel Four News portfolio which won the BAFTA ‘Best
News Coverage’ award in 1996. His investigations confirming covert US
weapons air drops into Tuzla and on the fall of Srebrenica were singled
out for praise in the Independent Television Commission programme review
for 1995.
Since 1978 Nik Gowing has reported on many of the main international
conflicts. He was bureau chief in Rome (1979) and Warsaw (1980-83). He
collected a BAFTA award for his exclusive coverage of martial law in
Poland in 1981. In 1989 he broke the news that Russian troops were
secretly leaving Afghanistan. He received an award from the New York TV
Festival for his military and diplomatic analysis of the Gulf War.
During the 1980’s as Foreign Affairs correspondent, then Diplomatic
Correspondent, Nik Gowing reported extensively from Central and Eastern
Europe, and the former Soviet Union. In 1989 he reported the revolutions
marking the end of Communism, as well as the unrest in China. He remained
an accredited correspondent in Moscow, where he reported the assault on
the White House in 1993.
From 1991 he reported extensively on war in the former Yugoslavia with
particular emphasis on diplomacy and the politico-military. His Channel
Four documentary Diplomacy and Deceit on the limits and failures of
diplomacy in conflict management was widely acclaimed.
In 1994 he was a resident fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on
the Press, Politics and Public Policy in the John F.Kennedy School of
Government, Harvard University. His published Harvard study challenged
conventional wisdom of an automatic cause and effect relationship between
real-time television coverage of conflicts (the ‘CNN factor’) and the
making of foreign policy.
His 1997 study for the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict
in Washington DC has similarly challenged conventional wisdom on
assumptions about a role for the media in preventing conflict. Like the
Harvard study it has received wide attention and stirred new international
debate.
As a result of both studies, he has received numerous invitations to both
participate in workshops and address defence/international relations
institutes, strategic studies/humanitarian affairs conferences, government
departments, the UN, the ICRC, military staff colleges, NGO’s and
humanitarian organisations.
In May 1998 he completed an extended study funded by the European
Commission into the effect of information control on humanitarian
organisations and the media in the Great Lakes Crisis of Central Africa
October 1996 - May 1997.
In September 1998 he was elected to the Council of the Royal Institute of
International Affairs at Chatham House, where he is now on the Executive
Committee. He is also a member of the Academic Council at the Wilton Park
conference centre, a vice chairman of the Westminster Foundation for
Democracy, a board member for the British Association for Central and
Eastern Europe, a member of the Advisory Board for the University of
Birmingham’s Centre for Studies in Security and Diplomacy, and a
Visiting Fellow in International Relations at Keele University in the UK.
He is a founding committee member for the Rory Peck Trust which campaigns
for the interests of freelance TV cameramen and women. He has recently
been invited to join the Strategy Committee of the Project on Justice in
Times of Transition at Harvard University.
(BBC NEWS
Publicity)
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  BBC NEWS with Nik Gowing Titles and
Headlines
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BBC NEWS with Nik Gowing End of the news bulletin
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April
2002 - Abril 2002
BBC NEWS with Nik Gowing Titles and
Headlines
(49s/2.92
Mb)
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