hello, this is bbc news with me, ben boulos. the headlines: queues for covid vaccines as pop—up centres and walk—in clinics open in england in a major push to offer coronavirus jabs to all remaining adults. hardliner ebrahim raisi has been declared the winner of iran's presidential election in a poll in which most would—be candidates were barred from standing. northern ireland's new first minister, paul givan, has been told he will have to resign when a new dup leader is in place. the son of a private investigator whose murder has remained unsolved for more than three decades criticises the metropolitan police's handling of the case. and rock fans from across the uk celebrate at the scaled down version of the download festival as it goes ahead as a test event.

now on bbc news, the media show. hello. the g7 summit, the nato summit, putin, biden, the world's biggest leaders were face to face in a series of meetings this week. these are some of the most intensely scrutinised meetings you can imagine. and you will have to imagine because of course none of the press were allowed in the room. so how easy is it forjournalists who specialise in diplomacy to sort fact from spin? in fact, do the politicians even want them there? unless of course it's to snap them posing grandly on the beach in those ubiquitous family photos. let me introduce you to my wonderful panel of guests. patrick wintour is diplomatic editor at the guardian. naomi o'leary is europe correspondent for the irish times. rym momtaz is senior france correspondent at politico

and steven erlanger is the pulitzer prize—winning journalist and currently chief diplomatic correspondent at the new york times. steven, you've been covering this week's international diplomacy from your base in brussels. tell us, are you the only journalist left in the city? naomi is here too. part of the problem is that covid has made it very hard to travel. so if you want to go bouncing around, you need to have a whole separate nose for all of the tests. and you have to worry about quarantine and we have enough people on the white house plane and so on and we had someone in london to cover parts and moscow covered geneva and i was here in brussels. so there are still some people here, yes. so you have been very busy. naomi, you managed to get to some of the summits? in general, over the past year, most of the events in brussels have been remote and they really reduced

the contact between journalists and the top leadership and also things like the delegation that countries are allowed to bring with them. so it has been a bit different rather than being gathered together in press rooms and press facilities where everybody has got their laptops and so on, a lot of the summits you are actually in your own apartment covering it from your laptop and coordinating over the phone with people. and sometimes following press conferences and so on over zoom or dipping in on live streams, so quite a different experience. i think there's pros and cons to both. yes, zoom, zoom, zoom. we are all on zoom as well now. rym, i know you were in cornwall for the g7 but where you now? am i back in paris, thank god. got back home. after a long few days on the road and very little sleep. _ you can be back in your own bed now. patrick, you were there as well i hear?

i was, i took the 19—hour train journey to cornwall and then you sit in a press room which is more than a 50—minute drive from where the actual leaders are meeting. so you are very much one step removed but i very much agree that it's been a frustrating year for us and i was hoping maybe even this week to have gone to tehran for the iran presidential elections and i got a visa and was all set to go and then it became too complicated with covid certificates and timelines so it's been a frustrating time. also with me today is tom wainwright, media editor at the economist and tom, let's start with you. and with a big media story of the week, the launch of gb news. i am sure you have been watching it. andrew neil on this programme said it was going to offer appointment to view television. what have you made of it so far? it's interesting. i'm probably more used to writing stories about news organisations going bankrupt and having to lay off

all theirjournalists rather than new ones starting, so it makes a nice change to have a new linear tv channel. i think so far, the quality maybe is a bit uneven. they have got some very experienced journalists like andrew neil and some less experienced and the budget they have is very, very low. they are planning to spend 20, £25 million a year which would sustain the bbc for two or three days. so people have been saying it looks a little bit cheap in places, and it is cheap, they are doing it on a shoestring, but it's created quite a big buzz in their first week. they might be happy with that. we have also seen some companies pull their advertising from the channel. what is the general reaction? i think we have to wait a few weeks. the first week you will see teething problems of the sort that they have had and you will see more people tuning in than they would in future weeks just to get a sense of what it's like. let's wait and see. i think the advertising thing is potentially going to be a problem for them. there have been lots of comparisons with fox news in the states which is very commercially

successful but fox makes most of its money out of fees it charges cable networks carrying the channel. gb news is distributed free so it relies entirely on advertising for its income. and so if advertisers start to lose interest then that will be a big problem. also this week a parade of bbc director general appeared at the select committee. they were being grilled on why journalist martin bashir was not fired back in 1997 when he was found to have lied about faking documents and they were also asked about why he was rehired by the bbc in 2016. do you think the bbc is now able to put this issue to one side and focus on different bigger challenges ahead? i hope so. this week it was kind of more of the same. it was more mps getting a chance to needle the bbc which many of them enjoy, more chances for the bbc to grovel again over this story which was a hideous blunder but yes, watching it i felt there are other things going on. i think when people look back

in the future at this year and last year it was the year when disney, the biggest hollywood studio, came into direct competition with the bbc through disney+. and i think there are big questions about what the role is for public broadcasting like the bbc in this world, this completely new world, of globalised streaming and people will look back and wonder why it was that parliament and the press are spending so much of that time talking about the princess diana interview or whether or not the bbc should have aired the lyrics to royal britannia or whatever the latest culture war is. i hope they can move on to other stuff soon. thank you for that. let us turn back to the world of diplomacy. it's been a mammoth fortnight of summits and presidential meetings. but despite the masses of photos doing the rounds, this sort of action always takes place away from the eyes of the press. so, steven, give me the nuts and bolts of yourjob for the new york times. how do you find out what's happened when you are stuck on the other side of the door? you often find out by not sitting around at the summit

itself but sitting around and phoning people. the great advantage of the mobile phone is it's revolutionised diplomatic reporting. in the old days you could not reach people and now you can reach them even when they're in the actual meeting. so that's a big help. you are looking always for interlocutors and you're looking for the people who have been briefed by the people who are in the room. and that takes a lot of preplanning and it takes a lot of relationships and it takes building up trust. it's not something you can do in a minute. and not do well, you can look at the communiques and pass them out and there is news about who is making a blunder and who's doing well and who's speaking properly and what the boss says, whether it's the president or the prime minister, this matters.

but the real heart of these things is actually in the greyer people, men and women who are preparing and briefing the bosses and those are the people that you need to get a hold of. i like that, the greyer people. the people in the room are the least important. it's the ones outside that know what's going to happen first. yes, and sometimes they don't even tell you. so talking about telling people, naomi, you speak to people who have their own agenda all the time. there is a lot of spin around this sort of stuff. you hear phrases like a robust exchange of views or they had a very frank discussion, how do you cut through that when you were not there? how do you get to the actual truth of it? a lot of those phrases that are - familiar are codes for what happens. so a frank exchange of views usually means it was a bit testy— and i think, like steve said, - it was the really important work goes in the months and years before the meeting actually happens. -

at the moment when the news breaks, that is not the time _ when someone who does not know you is going to answer a call- or a text, so you have to have those iexisting relationships in place long| before and also those relationships of trust and understanding - about where those people are coming from and what their angle _ is and that will help _ you to evaluate what you find out. being physically present or as close to the meeting as possible is useful for things like picking up - on the atmosphere, if a worried official suddenly hurriedly ran out, that can tell you a lot. _ and then also what's really - important about it is when you do have access to the leaders, - having the opportunity to ask them questions unrestrictedly, - because sometimes a hesitation and inability to answer a question, just catching them off guard - will tell an awful lot - about what happened as well. and the issue with the summits| going more behind closed doors during covid is that the more controlled the circumstancesj

and the environment _ is about the access ofjournalists, the more pressure that can be put on journalists to play nice - and if you really restrict. the number ofjournalists and just choose six or something like that, - then those journalists are under pressure to ask questions that - are friendly so they're asked again. and it's a really noxious _ dynamically and why it's important to have broad access. like i say, really important journalism is done away i from the location and is done - remotely on the phone to people and that's where a lot of the really good digging into sources- and original stuff comes from. i'm glad you mentioned that. we'll touch on that later. you say a lot of work goes in the months and months before that. steven, is being a diplomatic journalist a bit like being an actual diplomat? how do you cultivate sources on both sides? in a way it is not because you actually have more agency and your area of responsibility is wider and it's actually,

you have more ability to move in and out and you probably have more access to diplomatic bosses than the actual diplomats do. now part of it is the power of our institutions. i work for a very important newspaper so everyone wants to spin us in a certain way. that is interesting. essentially these people are not your friends but you are having to cultivate a very trusting relationship with them. you have won a pulitzer prize for your work on russia. how easy did you find that, finding sources within the kremlin? i was in russia at a very nice time. i first went with maggie thatcher in '85 when gorbachev came to power but i lived there for the new york times with the collapse of the soviet union and the first four years of yeltsin, when the place was really open and you could talk to people.

it's much, much harder now. i think it's really difficult now but then you could... it's almost like covering palestine. people will talk to you and they use their names and they are not worried about you and now it's a much harsher regime and talking tojournalists did have much worse consequences. i think it's much harder now than it was then. i feel very lucky to have been able to wander the former soviet union when it was so chaotic and in some ways free. talking about wandering the world and cultivating sources, patrick and rym, you both travelled down to the g7 summit in sunny cornwall, but patrick, how close did you actually get to the action? if you mean by the action, - the actual room in which the seven leaders and the european union were actually meeting, - i was, as i said earlier, - roughly 55 minutes drive away.

so you're watching quite a lot l on television and you are trying to pick up moods from the very short slots of camera you get _ before a bilateral meeting or something like that. i so you are a long way away. but you have to use the phone as said before and you have - to contact people who are in a large number of different delegations and then there's this moment l on sunday which was a car crash - of news when the communique comes out which is incredibly long. you get every metre having a press conference almost simultaneouslyl and you have about an hour. and a half to digest it and try and make sense of it and that's i when there can be a lot of hanging about and suddenly you have to move very quickly. - that's true with a lot ofjournalism — you're hanging around _ and then you're on speed. you have to make very quick judgments at that point. - still worth going and still worth turning up? yes, i think so.

it's going to get better. this was pretty well the first - physical summit we have had of any stature and it was really about the idea that - multilateralism is back. there were subagendas _ about what we do about china and how is boris doing and how— we are all getting on sorry, boris, mrjohnson was doing etc, - but the kernel of it was that this was the first physical summit and this was the arrival- ofjoe biden in europe and this was the return of— multilateralism after trump. that's really what this event was about. - the fact that it was happening. rym, you were there as well. naomi and steven touched upon this earlier that this groundwork and preparation that goes into the months before a summit like this, but how much journalism can you actually do once you are there? because you are there essentially to ask questions and find out answers.

you can actually do a lot ofjournalism but it also means you have to be hustling the entire time. when i say hustling, you also need to be harassing sometimes some of the people that you know. for example, i did get to go to the site where the leaders where meeting, which was, as patrick was saying, 55 minutes drive away, but that's because i had been talking to the elysees folks, french presidency folks, for days about wanting to be there at the top of the bilateral meeting between president macron and president biden and those spots are very scarce and there's a lot of competition to get one of them. i did get that spot. we were about four on the french side and people perhaps don't understand, why do you want to be there? it's important to be there to see for yourself the body language, to pick up on some things that perhaps are not on camera, especially for such an important first meeting. it's the first time that

president macron and president biden were meeting and also when you finally get there, you do actually get maybe a couple of minutes with one of the important advisers who is going to be basically the person who is going to respond to your questions and it's good for them to see you and it's good for you to say hello so you have to do that. and then you spend a whole lot of time on your phone, whole lot of time, lots of frustration and i have to sayjust in terms of this g7 if i may, this was supposed to be and this is supposed to be the meeting of the richest democracies in the world and obviously in a democracy the role ofjournalists and access to information is extremely important. i thought it was quite a bizarre decision on the side of the british hosts to decide to basically park the journalists so far away that we were cut off from the normal access we should be getting. it did not seem like the best

example or message to be sending. let's come back to that in a second because i think we have got a clip of the meeting you're talking about betweenjoe biden and macron where you were trying to ask question amongst a pool of reporters at the end of a photo opportunity. let's play it now. provide the backbone and support for nato and so we are very supportive. very supportive. thank you. so that ends with a us official telling you to move on and shooing you away. you had to have very pushy elbows to get there in the beginning, right? it's interesting because i've always been told that i have a voice that carries and you could kind of hear my voice, i'm the person speaking in french because i cover french president emmanuel macron and i was trying to get him to respond to borisjohnson coming out with this northern ireland protocol thing and he could not hear me.

he knows me and we usually make eye contact and i was counting on that and the american pool of reporters were just all screaming at the same time to get biden to respond and yes, it is like that and in the end we got one line out of emmanuel macron saying, "yes, definitely america is back in the multilateral fold," and of course we were ushered out very, very quickly and actually the leaders said, "well done, you guys are very tenacious." how stage—managed is something like the g7 summit? when it comes to the bilaterals, it is stage—managed by the people who run it but actually once we are in front of them, as you can hear, that was not stage—managed, they expect us to be shouting questions but we will do our best to impose a 0&a at that time... but they also shoo you away a lot, they don't give you the space to ask those questions. no, and it's a part of the game and part of the relationship.

we are not buddies as you were staying at the beginning, saying at the beginning, we are not friends, we have a working relationship and sometimes it's a relationship that gets really to be quite difficult but that's our job. we ask questions and they are free to respond or not. patrick, there has a bit of controversy about boris johnson's final press conference with some people questioning why only eight journalists and only two foreign journalists were allowed to the press briefing. did the guardian have someone there? we did, and my colleague heather stewart, went and she left at ten in the morning and she spent good time on the road and then she was in a holding pen for a while and then she was in the room where the press conference was to be held and she was given the very last question at the end and i think he took about eight or so questions. so one question perjournalist then? i remember being at a gs and i think

they did allow some foreign journalists because they started to complain that they had not been asked, which was also ridiculous, and the problem is every country has its own agenda so everyone wanted in the uk press pack to ask about what was happening over covid because there was going to be the announcement coming up so they wanted to tease something out about that or they were trying to get into this story around sausages... some police, this is hackney, many people dying outside as usual, a police car going by. but anyway, there's always these different agendas and they finally did allow some foreign journalists to ask some broader questions. but it is noticeable that the climate was pretty tight. biden himself i think only took a 30—minute press conference and in the course of that managed to confuse libya and syria and certainly confused me in the process as why he suddenly took interest in libya. if you take someone like obama at pittsburgh, it would be a lecture lasting 45 minutes to start

with and then about an hour and 15 minute questions and he would be taking questions from anywhere around the floor. it was very open. but we are in this covid period and i thinkjournalists collectively have to make sure we come out of it and we don't let politicians use this window to try and permanently change the access we have. i was going to ask, is itjust covid or is it a global precedent for shutting down access? rym, ijust saw you raise your hand. you don't have to raise your hand. what do you want to say? i just wanted to say one thing on this g7. this was supposed to be the big debut on the world stage of global britain after brexit and the fact that the host prime minister decided to only allow journalists who are based in london, right, so even the two journalists that work for international media are people who are based in london and the fact that they decided to restrict it that way really makes me wonder about what does global britain look like and is that really the right way to do it?

i remember biarritz at the g7 two years ago that emmanuel macron hosted, he spent an hour answering questions and there were people...that room was packed and they were journalists from all over the world, as one should in that situation, so that's one thing that really is still puzzling to me about this g7. on your question about whether they are using covid as an excuse to keep us at bay? yes, 100%. that has been the case for a year now and it's been extremely difficult and covid is like a godsend excuse for officials who don't really want to talk to the media to say, "i can't meet you because covid," and actually there are different ways to get around it. there are encrypted apps that people can use if they really wanted to talk to you and as patrick was saying, i think it will be very important for us journalists to hold their feet to the fire and make sure we go back to the way

we used to operate before covid. steven, what do you make about this? zoom press conferences are a scandal and a nightmare and brussels in particular uses them to make sure that you can't follow up a question. they will meet and they will talk at you and they will take three or four questions and you can't follow it up, it's really annoying and it really needs to stop because i think it's degrading for all of us and it's actually for them, although i am not sure they understand this fully, it's counterproductive. let's just have a look at some of those policies that came out from that summit. tom wainwright, media editor for the economist, let me bring you in here. the g7 leaders put out a statement saying that they had agreed to some reforms to take on the tech giants. the role of silicon valley

is something we talk about a lot on the media show. are we now going to see the g7 nations taking on the might of facebook or google? i think maybe up to a point. the main thing you'rej referring to is this tax proposal and i think that's _ about more than just the tech firms. that's an attempt to try and get |all multinationals to try and pay more tax and i think that's - something that's been brewing for some time and you can trace that way back to the financial crisis - and since then people have been. wondering if there is more that can be done and it was earlier this year i thinkjanet yellen said america i did not want to race - to the bottom and i think this is the conclusion of that. so it goes broader than tech. i it's all multinationals which have i been using tax laws in some cases to avoid paying very much tax at alt _ i think more broadly, _ there is a bit more of a willingness and eagerness really to take on some of these tech firms. _ we saw last year during _ the election, it was funny that both

republicans and democrats . were criticising social networks about the question of free speech from opposite points of view - and so they have to try and manage this now. i it is very delicate. very briefly now. steven, are we starting to get a sense of what they are expecting when it comes to the media, especially silicon valley giants? i think we are but he's also a controlling person too. white house press conferences, at least he's having them and trump did not have them so now biden is having them every day which is good but his proposal of a minimum corporate tax is i think very popular and very progressive and very unusual and i think people should take it quite seriously. that's it for today. thank you to all my guests. patrick wintour, diplomatic editor at the guardian, naomi o'leary, europe correspondent for the irish times, steven erlanger, chief diplomatic correspondent at the new york times, rym momtaz, senior france correspondent at politico, tom wainwright, media editor

at the economist. the media show will be back same time next week. thanks for listening. hello again. today has been a pretty cloudy day. we've seen a few cloud breaks, a little bit of sunshine coming through for some through the afternoon and a few showers in scotland, but my attention is now turning to the south, where we started to see some big thunderstorms break out again and these are going to be push northwards. the rain will be quite extensive, quite heavy with some thunder mixed in across south—east england, anywhere really from the isle of wight and hampshire eastwards, into east anglia too. now, the heaviest rain could bring some localised surface water flooding, especially given how wet the weather has been over recent days. there will be some showers developing further west for south—west england and wales as well. temperatures overnight 10—14.

tomorrow, this rain pulls away from eastern areas of england, then we will be left with a lot of cloud across the country again. showers in scotland developing through the afternoon, this time there will be one or two in northern ireland as well, and although most of us will keep the cloud all day, there will be some sunshine across northern ireland, north—west england, and the north—west of wales too.

hello. this is bbc news. in a few minutes the tea—time news with martine croxall. but first, pop—up vaccination centres and walk in clinics are opening in england this weekend, in a major push to offer coronavirus jabs to all remaining adults. it comes as surge testing is being rolled out in areas of south london and cumbria amid a rise in cases. i've been speaking to professor adam finn of thejoint committee on vaccination and immunisation, about the latest rise in infections and how it compares to previous waves. so, i certainly believe it's the third wave. we're seeing the number of cases going up quite consistently now and the beginnings of a rise in hospitalisations.

but in terms of the second part of your question, i