infections in 2 months, raising more question marks over the further relaxation of restrictions. for the first time in nine months, people in glasgow will be able to socialise in each others homes and drink alcohol in pubs & restaurants as parts of scotland move to lower restriction levels from today. now on bbc news... the media show. hello. the role of foreign reporter is one of the most cameras in journalism. some of our most memorable moments came from those with their eyes and ears on the ground. but does that reporting now face an existential crisis? like the rest of us, many international correspondents and spent the past

year grounded at home. audiences and newspaper editors got use to a year of massively reduced coverage. within newsrooms there is a greater emphasis on string there is to tell the story for us. so are these changes permanent? and what do we lose if our perspective no longer comes from one of our own? i have a first—class panel of guests with me to explore all of that and more. john simpson is the bbc�*s world affairs editor and a veteran of foreign reporting, covering almost every major warfor 50 years. sebastian walker is the washington, dc bureau chief for vice news and before that ran to middle east payroll. christina is chief correspondent for the sunday times. reporting in pakistan and afghanistan for more than three decades and senior international correspondent for cnn based in istanbul. before we get into the heart of the programme, you are the only one actually not based at home. you are out and about.

so, can you tell us where are you and what are you doing? we are actually en route to a climate change story taking place in turkey. there has been an explosion of what looks like an alien, weird, slimy substance in a sea. we are actually going to do a story on that and how it's tied to climate change and we will be diving into it. it will be gross and interesting. of all the things i was expecting you to say, slimy alien substance was not that. anyway, let us start with the most obvious challenge. how do you do foreign reporting during a pandemic when you are not actually allowed to go anywhere. john simpson, you have been doing this for over half a century. you have reported from over 120 countries around the world, how does this last year compare?

it has been absolutely terrible to be honest. once i was stuck in a hospital bed, i remember i worked out that i climbed on a plane every five days during my 50 whatever it was years, i have climbed on no planes for the past year and i had real withdrawal symptoms. it's nice to be with my family though i suspect that i may be stretching their patience. but in professional terms, it's very depressing. and it's rather infuriating as well. have you managed to do any foreign reporting? not really. even now, this is partly my age.

i am 76 and i only recently, fairly recently had my second jab. so, in a way you could say that it was natural for them to say, well, leave him where he is and get somebody else to go somewhere. but i was talking to a friend of mine, a really young producer he is 30 on something and he just came back yesterday from oman injordan and was bouncing off the walls and ceilings at the joy in having been away. so it was notjust me, scarcely anybody i know has been travelling in this last year. that must be hard, have you had to ground all of your reporters. we could not do that. we had to cover one of the most important elections in recent times. so we have had to find ways around it and i was in new york during the peak of covid—i9

and last spring when 800, 900 people a day dying of covid—i9 and we were operating in just unprecedented way where we were just getting back from a shoot taking everything off, washing our clothes every day, taking these very extreme measures to mitigate the risks as best we could. a situation you never had to encounter entirely before? out of all of our panelists today, if i'm correct, you're locked down in istanbul, have your activities been curtailed or have you still been able to move around and covering different stories? no. it's been quite interesting. right now we are not in lockdown. at the moment but at the same time turkey does have a number- of restrictions that are in place and then you have the other. issue of the fact thatl i am based in turkey,

i live here and turkey is on the red list - for a number of other countries. and you run up against that. i had done significantly less trips than the next year- than i used to like yes, - i went to beirut for the point explosion that happened. there i got a couple of trips - into and i went into syria and it's really been the challenge - of shifting your thinking and having it move from how do i get- to the story to be able to best tell it and morphing back into how do i tell the story best— using what is there remotely so i a lot of experience and freelancers trying to guide them _ through my personal style and trying to ensure that they are asking the right questions. _

building that out to be a interview. but it's been a very interesting shift and i think our own way . of approaching reporting. i am glad you brought that up because we're going to come to that later in the programme. i wanted to bring in here because you are a chief correspondent, how have you found the past year? have you been able to get out and do any reports? it's been a very strange yearfor me. i have been a foreign correspondent since i was 21 which is 33 years. even when i was pregnant i travelled more than i travelled in the last year but the last time i did a foreign assignment was in march of last year in south sudan. i have not done anything since then. is it fair to ask, are we in the middle of an existential crisis? we have audiences, we had editors who have got used to far less foreign coverage and, let's face it, foreign reporting is horrendously expensive. reduced coverage does mean reduced cost which is great news for cash—strapped organisations.

i'll come back to you, christina, how worried are you that we may never see pre—pandemic levels of foreign reporting? i'm very worried because we l drastically reduced our foreign coverage as a result of this and the rest of the - world did not stop. wars were still going _ on in afghanistan and syria and one and many other places. lots of things were happening. how many pages were the sunday times dedicated to reporting? not that many years ago i we had ten pages and now we have three. frustrating, people are not complaining to readers - and so my fear is that we will never get that back. - it's really heartbreaking _ because i spend all my time doing foreign reporting and i'm sure like everyone else l and i'm getting messages from people in different countries about things that are happening l and we are not covering them.

do you share christina's pessimism? i think it's the origins of the reasons for pessimism don't lie in covid—i9. this is a process which has been going on for at least five years. in my personal and professional experience i think from around the world, newspapers around the world, i think you can see signs that newspapers, television, radio have all been contracting for some time. do you think that's because audiences have lost interest and lost the taste for foreign news? no. i don't think it's anything to do with audiences, i think it's to do with money and the squeeze that generates them as a profession is experiencing. as you said, it costs a lot to have

foreign correspondents. for instance, just in the issue of the case of foreign news, that money is not there. it's not there for the sunday times and i guess it's not there for cnn. it's probably not there for vice. it's not there for the bbc. i just saw you nodding away. do you agree? i agree in that this is a phenomenon that i think we as an industry has been facing for a while and we've also globally speaking facing this sort of tragic trend of looking inwards and in the sense that nations on that scale have really been looking inward. governments have been looking inward. what i fear the covid—i9 pandemic did with us on an individual level there actually was a sense among western audiences if i'm going to put them over

there being that most of us when we report foreign news, we report from non—western countries, on topics that these western audiences can't necessarily relate to. they can't relate to the level of war we are talking about in syria or can't relate to the level of poverty in these nations that are really struggling to even feed their kids one meal a day. but when covid—i9 hit, people all of a sudden went through this experience of what if i was going through this in the middle of a war? or in the middle of a refugee camp? and on a human level you had a bit more connection on a global scale but then, again on that bigger government level, there was a lot of inward looking. that is the big problem that i think we as foreign journalists have to fight against. people are interested in each other. we cannot allow this sense of,

it's too expensive, or people are not interested, or they're not watching. we cannot allow that apathy to demoralise us. i want to bring other opinions here. you're on the other side of this. vice is a relative newcomer in this game. you must think there is a big audience appetite for the kind of work you're doing? definitely. i think she makes a good point about how connected people are now to the story. this international story that's unfolding around the world. people in this country have been through that and seen some of the highest rates of covid—19 and some of the highest rates of this disease. so now, it's a really important point. now when they see stories from other places like what's happening in india right now and what's around the corner in nepal, i think there is a real opportunity

there for internationaljournalism into really tell stories that have a connection to his audience because people have lived through that. you make an interesting point. i want to ask the question yes, there might be value in foreign reporting but with most of us working from home, surely there is a bigger reliance on the local reporters to carry out the work. that foreign reporters would traditionally have done and isn't there a big moral question around that? you talking about outsourcing the most dangerous parts ofjournalism to local people on the ground and what sort of risk does that carry? that's been the case but i can remember during the worst year as there is a huge reliance on those local places and even during that last fight against isis, it's nothing new but you're right, in places where the virus was ravaging the population there is an increasing reliance on those who were there on the ground. you have to find ways

to tell the story. what do you make of this? the relationship between foreign correspondent and stringer has always been a tricky one in a way? it is a relationship of mutual- strength or at least it ought to be. no sane foreign correspondent would go to a place and ignorej the local people that are working i for his or her outfit from there. i the question is that balance and their reasoning behind i using local people more than people like me. i itourists, if you like, people thati drop in my parachute into a story. it is of course much, _ much cheaper and you don't need

to pay a local person - for all the things that every organisation has to pay its own national reporters. exactly. they will be people listening who will say what value does a foreign correspondent bring when you've got someone on the ground and can tell the story authentically in their own way. i guess the question i want to ask is what does the past year tell us about foreign reporting anyway that foreign reporters are needed rely on hearsay or gossip or second—hand information from people on the ground. what do you make of that, you're actually in istanbul. i think being there adds a lot of nuances to the reporting because, take for example a story that you know intimately well the same way that these local stringers and fixers know their own life, own country intimately their well. sometimes, especially if it's a story that's been in the news for a very long time,

there is a certain added benefit to having that sort of fresh look coming in, also the other benefit of asking a question or following a train of thought, a train of emotion that maybe is so normal for the local journalists who live there that they don't think that it should necessarily be part of the news report but when you come in there exactly as the foreign correspondent you have that moment of we can all relate to this, we should actually focus this news report on this one small thing and i'll give one quick example. a year ago we went in just before the pandemic began and it seemed like every other horrific story of this intensified bombing and people on the road and we report that this so many times

i can't even remember and during that trip they were freezing cold and they were wearing flip—flops and i was in winter boots and they left their choice behind and they were hungry and my producer attends around and she's a mother and she says something is wrong and i was like what? and she says the children are not crying. the children should be crying. it had not crossed my mind, i've covered this story so many times. it had not crossed, we had a localfixer who was helping us out, it had not even clocked inside his mind because he had been seeing it for so long. there is merit to small details. helped a broader audience able to re—relate to the story. do you use stringers in your foreign reporting and how much do you rely on them? sometimes not so much because i have been going for a long time to various places so i know lots of people where i go and also some of the places.

there is massive value to having local knowledge and so in talking to lots of local people but sometimes some of the countries i cover are very dangerous for locals to cover and stories i might be doing would be very hard for them to be involved with and stay in the country whereas i fly away at the end of the day. i suppose that we are touching on here is that foreign reporting is incredibly dangerous and it's probably one of the most dangerous aspects ofjournalism and i want to ask you how confident are you at the sunday times has got your back if you are arrested or kidnapped abroad? you say you don't want to put that risk on local reporters and stringers but what about your own personal safety? sadly i lost a colleague of mine at the sunday times about ten years

ago in syria and that really brought home to us how dangerous it was and i think that led to some changes at the newspaper where we now have to do risk assessment before we get on a trip which drives us not because they ask you things like what is your exit plan. i don't know what my exit plan is. do you think it's pointless administration? i think there is an element of that. in the past i used to go off to places i never had a clue where i was nobody near and i have been kidnapped in pakistan and people did not know where i was so... how did you get out of that? did your bosses know? it's a long story. give us a very quick version. this was back in may 2001 and i was picked up in the middle

of the night from my hotel and taken and i was with a photographer unfortunately they took our mobile phones as soon as they came into the hotel room connects the first thing they did so it taught me a lesson not to leave my phone on the side but to sleep with it. but the photographer i was travelling with and this is the great thing now we almost never travel with photographers because that's expensive. the photographers carry a lot of equipment and he had a spare mobile phone and so he was able at some point to make a phone call so we were able to let people know and eventually through various things we got out. you were nodding along, i take it from that you have your own personal close calls? yes. we had a number of close calls. part of thejob. i am not downplaying the dangers but at the same time we are all very cognizant of them.

we are all very aware that you can plan and plan and plan, there will always be an element of uncertainty and the best that you can do is basically try to mitigate the consequences of that uncertainty and i do feel at least when it comes to cnn, they are very, very security conscious to the point where i sometimes feel like they are overprotective parents but that being said there have been a number of occasions where had i been left to my own devices i would have gone ahead with a plan and i probably would not be here today. we have talked about the value of foreign reporting and whether audiences even want or need it but i guess the question i would like to come through now is would it matter if foreign reporting fell by the wayside? given that last year we have had, could we reflect on any real—world

impact of foreign reporting? i remember back at the time of 9/11 and a period when the american networks had cut back pretty savagely on their foreign reporting and then out of the blue comes this appalling crisis killing thousands and thousands of people directed from a country which they may say most americans could not even point to on a map and there was a big, at that time, a big upsurge in people saying to networks in particular and not cnn because cnn's reporting was as always extremely good on these things but to nbc and cbs and abc, why didn't you tell us

that these things were building up? and there was a lot of self laceration on the part of the networks and one editor that i know said publicly, we promise you we will never drop our guard again and be will always tell you what's happening around the world things that we feel you ought to know, and of course it was about three years before they were right back where they had been. so it's not the only, so let me say, it's not the only function of foreign need to tell you about danger, of course it is not, but that is quite a major function. without that, people, our audiences are going to be quite angry with us if we have not been doing the job right. do you set out to change the world with your foreign reporting? what's the endgame for you?

i just don't think that's the right approach at all, to say to people, the audiences, listen, you have got to do something about this. the western governments got to get together. i don't feel that is the function of being a foreign correspondent. not in broadcasting terms. i think it's to say, look, here it is, i'm look, here it is, i'm telling you what's going on here, now it's up to you what you make of it. if you don't want to take any notice, that is your decision. if you do want to do something about it, that is also your decision. i am no part of this. i'm not going to start any campaigns and go marching and writing to my politicians because i don't think that's the function of public service broadcasting. you are not part of this,

you will not start any campaigns. what do you make of that? i agree with a lot of whatjohn is saying but i also feel like it is very easy to get them organised about the state of affairs and i do there is extreme value in what we do as foreign journalists because... and you have started a charity as a result of the work you have done? yes. i started a charity because i was so appalled and depressed over the apathy towards journalism and over the lack of impact thatjournalism is and i'm spotlighting these crisis and was having that i could no longer adjust their witness and so i started a charity that actually helps war impacted children who have fallen through the gaps and help assistance that they need but as demoralise

as i was i neverfor a second thought about giving up journalism and because at the end of the day even when because we are reporting on themes it's and hopeless, a world where the rest of us were not informed about that issue is not one that i want to live in. and when it comes to a lot of the things we cannot allow the government, the oppressors, the dictators to be the ones who write their own version of history. we need the version of history that foreign correspondents bring to life to be the one that is also part of the record. thank you to all of my guests today. thank you to today's sound engineer, and the media show will be back next week. thank you for your time.

hello there. it is looking pretty mixed this weekend. courtesy of this new weather arriving in gradually as the day wore on. this will bring outbreaks of patchy rain as we move through this evening and overnight into western areas in italy and then spreading its way eastwards into central northern and southern england and wales. meanwhile it was started up a little bit. clear skies

for western scotland by the end of the night. first of the night. for south east see some clear skies. temperatures between ten and i3. temperatures between ten and 13. this ridge of high pressure building in sunday across western areas. this will be in central and eastern parts. a bit of reverse fortunes. sunnier skies for sunday across government and northern ireland. for the rest of it will be cloudy thank this were the front which are bursts of rain. heavy downpours. more cloud. a bit cooler crossing into 21. sunday into monday that with different weekends pushing towards the east and leave a legacy. high pressure dominating. very light winds. i did a variable cloud and sunny spells but with that week for the front row eastern areas, to

destabilise the atmosphere. to see a few heavy showers. those temperatures reaching highs of around 19 to 21 or 22. through this week high pressure hose on across the south of the country. these areas of pressure group as the north—west and bring stronger winds. more clever than showery rain at times to parts of scotland and northern ireland. i would breezier across northern and western areas. closer to the high pressure in the south.

this is bbc news. the headlines at five: the uk chancellor, rishi sunak, says g7 finance ministers from the world's leading economies have reached a historic deal to reform the global tax system during talks in london. i think the crucial thing for people to take away is the principle of fairness. that is what we have achieved today, to ensure that there is a level playing field for all types of companies. testing is ramped up as the uk sees the highest number of new covid infections in two months, raising more question marks over the further relaxation of restrictions. covid restrictions have eased across much of scotland, with people in glasgow allowed to socialise indoors and drink alcohol in pubs and restaurants for the first time in nine months. and the first big events in their year of uk city of culture take place in coventry after a six—month delay.