Art of reporting hasn't changed in 100 years: Simpson
BBC journalist says his new book helped him understand that professional atmosphere for his kind has hardly changed
Dubai: In a witty, humourous address to a packed audience at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on Thursday night, BBC journalist John Simpson said that the actual art of reporting "hasn't changed in the slightest" over the past 100 years.
Reporters (mostly men at the time) doing the job as a correspondent in 1900, 1914 or 1916, "could have done the job 80 or 100 year later", Simpson said of his research and work on his new title Unreliable Sources'.
Simpson decided to work on this book for personal reasons, to find out what journalists have been like in the past century and to write a history of British reporting.
Apologising to the audience for his husky voice, Simpson said that television news was "all about forcing policemen to let you do things that they don't really want you to do", adding that he had to raise his voice more than once.
Simpson, the BBC's World Affairs Editor, flew in from covering the Iraqi elections to speak at the festival.
"The dichotomy between people generally writing the truth and people being prevented by governments or big interests, or most usually by the owners of papers, is as great as it ever was," he said of his research.
Daily newspaper The Guardian is essentially run by a trust, he said, that is there to oversee the running of the newspaper, but didn't interfere with the way it was put together. This is in contrast to the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, where the owners were "fierce about wanting the paper to say what they thought and disapproved of reporters saying what they wanted," he said.
Having been a reporter for 44 years, Simpson has interviewed many political leaders. Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran "wasn't a bundle of laughs" he joked.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, on the other hand, "was a bundle of laughs", he admitted.
Robert Mugabe doesn't "bother to hide your inadequacies," but is "not a terribly nice person to interview", he said of some of his more memorable interviews.
Last day of festival
The Literature Festival, held under the patronage of the Dubai Arts and Culture Authority at the Intercontinental Hotel, in Dubai Festival City, will conclude on Saturday.
