this is bbc news. the headlines: a big fire has broken out at evin prison in the iranian capital, tehran, where hundreds of political prisoners and dozens of dual nationals are held. in videos posted online, gunfire and sirens can be heard. roads to the prison have been closed off. the chinese leader, xijinping, has emphasised the need for further economic development in his address to the twentieth communist party congress, which has opened in beijing. president xi said the country's new policy would be to "work hard to promote high quality development". britain's new chancellor of the exchequer, jeremy hunt, has admitted the government made mistakes when announcing unfunded tax cuts last month and that very difficult economic decisions would now have to be taken. he's promised to restore certainty and predictability to public finances

after weeks of turmoil. now on bbc news, the media show. hello. as the war in ukraine continues to escalate, what role does journalism play in peacemaking, in dialling down the rhetoric? the bbc'sjohn simpson, was in kyiv last week to interview president zelensky. in a moment, we will hear his take. and with me in the studio is another giant ofjournalism, emma tucker is the editor of the sunday times, only the second woman to have done thatjob in more than 100 years. emma, welcome to the media show. hello, katie. presumably the fact that you are able to come in here on a wednesday means that wednesday isn't the day when you have to decide what the front page is? wednesday is definitely not the day when we decide

on the front page, but it is a day when we are thinking very hard about it. because there is this intense pressure when you are editing a sunday paper all week because you are expected to break exclusives. so if you haven't got anything in the bag by wednesday, you are beginning to panicjust a little. and are you panicking this week, how are you feeling? actually, iam not, we have got two crackers. great, and then, of course, there's the supplements as well. do you sign off all the supplements and the magazines, too? so you've presumably done them much earlier? yes, i make a point of signing off all the supplements so this morning i should have signed off culture but i was actually late in and my deputy signed it off for me. and then tomorrow i will sign off the magazine and style. on friday i sign off travel and money and at some point along the way, i also sign off property. it is a busy time? it is a busy week, yeah. and we will get very excited about your two scoops coming up. i am assuming you are not going to tell me anything about them now? no, i'm not. 0k, more from you, emma, in a bit, but first let's turn

to ukraine and the bbc�*s world affairs editor, john simpson, he went to kyiv to interview president zelensky, but found himself back on our screens reporting on monday's bombardment by the russians. john simpson was of course a fixture of bbc coverage from the world's hotspots for decades. earlier today, he crossed the border into poland and i asked him what it's like to be back. a bit like the old days, really. to us, too! i mean, i do miss these kind of things. not because i have... people say oh, it is the adrenaline kick and all that kind of slightly boring stuff. actually, it's really interesting to be in a place where important things are happening and to see them for yourself and to know what is really going on. as opposed to, you know, what everybody thinks or what you read, whatever. that is why it is so interesting and that's what takes you back to these

places again and again. of course. in a bit, i would like to come back to your assessment of what is happening in ukraine and the wider continent, but let's go back to your interview with president zelensky which went out on friday, and was the point of your visit as i understand it. talk us through the circumstances, give us a sense of where it was recorded and the security around him? we did it in the presidential palace. but it was very much kind of wartime conditions. there were little sandbag emplacements along the corridors and up the main staircases and so on. we weren't even able to take a watch in with us. our watches were banned, i suppose for some sort of security reason. and, you know, frankly it was

a real wartime interview. no natural light because the windows were all sandbagged up. and it felt very... very tense and very, very exciting and interesting. and it was noticeable at the start of the interview, president zelensky answered in english before switching to ukrainian, why was that? he made a bit of a mistake a few days earlier. the beginning of last week, something like that, when he seemed to say at some australian conference, again, not quite clear why he would have done that, but he seemed to say that the west should stage pre—emptive strikes against russia to stop it using nuclear weapons. of course, everybody immediately assumed that meant he was calling for pre—emptive

nuclear strikes on russia. he said to me in english, i think, to make absolutely certain that everybody got the point and we would definitely use it, that wasn't his purpose, he wasn't talking about anything to do with nuclear strikes, he wanted a pre—emptive kind of, sort of more sanctions and that kind of thing. do you think he was mistranslated or did he misspoke? i think he misspoke, i think that's why he did it. i think it came tumbling out. he works incredible hours. his life is very, very stressful. and i think he just wasn't absolutely in command of what he was saying at that particular moment. i am sure he didn't mean he wanted pre—emptive nuclear strikes against russia. that would be pretty crazy. of course, nobody would do it anyway.

i noticed during the interview he was wearing an earpiece, was that simultaneous translation or something? yes, usually on these things you get a translator with you and they kind of whisper in your ear or let you know in some way or another what has been said after the question has been answered. we tried a new thing, which i think is far, far better, more advantageous, which is just a translation that is going on all the time from a couple of translators in the next—door room. you've run the wires out through the doors and into your ear. he had, i think it was rather a large earpiece, a lot larger than mine. yours was very discreet, i didn't notice your one. did you feel a responsibility, you always feel a responsibility to get the interview right,

but given the escalation, you have seen what it was? yes. there were two or three important issues that you couldn't walk away from an interview with president zelensky without asking him. the first one was, did he think that there was going to be a nuclear attack? no question more important than that, really. and for his own reasons, of course, he has got to really keep our attention on the russian threat. so he wasn't going to say, no, i don't think there will be one, but at the same time he doesn't seem to feel that is imminent in any way. so what he tended to do

was to say that president putin was saying this, because he knows how unpopular the war is becoming in russia and he wants to make these kind of aggressive claims to keep the far right wingers, if we can call them that, conservatives, whatever, in his own organisation and his own government, to keep them, you know, on side. so those were the kind of questions. obviously, you want to ask the kind of questions which will provide important answers in one way or another. and though that was one of the key things... sorry to interrupt, but how careful did you feel you have to be? did you feel there was a sense you were the journalist or peacemaker, if you like? no, i am not really very happy with that notion that you go there with a purpose. the only purpose you go there for is to simply find out

what they think about what is going on. was there anything off the table or could you ask anything? i am sure i could have asked anything, i don't think there was anything off the table, no. that is what i always have a bee in my bonnet about, not to tell the interviewee beforehand, except in the most general terms. you know, not to let them get away with saying that some subjects are off the table. because how do you assess the control the ukrainian government has over how this conflict is reported, because clearly president zelensky is a key part of their media strategy. during the air raids, he was outside taking a video on his phone and he is very adept at getting a message out? he is, and you have to know that. you have to know that he wants to manipulate you. it so happens quite a large

proportion of the audience the interview was being watched and listened to by agree with him and think he is right, on the right side. but you have got to know as the interviewer, he wants to make himself, his country and his side and his purposes look good and you are the instrument that he is using to do that. you know, you have got to make it absolutely clear that you are not on his side because that's not what we are paid to do. and i think that is really, really important. let mejust say, i have heard quite a lot of interviews with president zelensky where people are rather inclined to say, we are on your side, we think you are a great guy. regardless of what you might think privately, that isn't the right approach,

i don't think. we have talked on this programme before about impartiality and whether journalists are being or can be impartial in a war like this. and as a journalist who has covered endless conflicts over the years, do you think this conflict is different of how it is covered in terms of the role ofjournalists? i don't think i have been at a conflict like this, where there was so much support in my own country for one side. and that is pretty unusual. i don't know, it may be back in the falklands time, it was different. it probably was. but since then, so many wars have been so divisive, things i have covered. you know, the invasion of iraq in particular, but also a variety of other things where large numbers

of people back home did not agree with, with the whole idea. in this case, it is different. there are people who are very strongly against what president zelensky stands for and what ukraine stands for, but there aren't that many of them. i think it really is important not to go along with that feeling, you know, we are all on your side, mr zelensky. that doesn't feel good to me. that was the bbc�*s world affairs editor, john simpson, talking to me from the polish ukrainian border. you can see the full interview on the bbc iplayer. we are fortunate to have emma with us today, the editor of the sunday times. what did you make of whatjohn simpson was saying at the end, some journalists in the west have been too keen to pick a side? it is really interesting and it is really easy forjournalists to get caught

up in the righteousness of a war. the job of ourjournalists out there is to act as trusted eyewitnesses. it makes me think of a particular story we had with one of ourjournalists over there, louise callaghan, reporting from an area that had been under russian occupation and the ukrainians had liberated it. the interesting story she reported was that not everyone in the villages she went to were happy to see the russians leave. of course, some want the russians to be there? yes, but that is the value of having somebody on the ground acting as an eyewitness and sending back reports that people can really trust. has the sunday times had somebody there all the time, how have you covered this conflict? we haven't had someone there all the time, because fielding war correspondents is very expensive business. we sent louise callaghan

over pretty much as soon as the war broke out. she was there for a while and eventually came out and someone else took over. christina lamb. they both did some fantastic reports. former moscow correspondent mark bennett was in there up until last week. as it happens, we haven't got anybody over there this week but we have got a dispatch coming from ukraine because we have built up a good network of stringers and local reporters. christina lamb, chief foreign correspondent, was on the show in 2021 and she talked back then, she was grounded because of the pandemic and like other foreign reporters, she was speculating that covid would be used for permanent cutbacks when it comes to foreign travel, as foreign travel and foreign coverage is very expensive?

yes, she wrote these brilliant pieces about a hotel in shrewsbury. she turned it into a book, which turned it into a hotel for the homeless. we are not going to cut back on ourforeign coverage, we are very committed in investing in foreign reporting but it is a dying business these days because it is very expensive. is it important for a paper like the sunday times to have staff all over the world or in bureaus, or is that a relic of a bygone age? it is a bit of a relic. we share our correspondents with the times, we have a pool of correspondents at the times which the sunday times can draw on. but we have a handful of foreign reporters who are dedicated to the sunday times, because that is how we get the good exclusives or the distinctive content for sunday. it makes sense. let's take a step back and look at you and what you want to do

with the sunday times. let's start with your own career, when did you decide you wanted to be a journalist, was it early on? i think it was. i sometimes think i fell into it by default. but then i look back and think, it can't really be default because i was proactively doing journalism. my first foray into journalism was while i was at university. i was caught up in an incident, i was sitting in my room and happily minding my own business as a first—year student. suddenly my door flew open and the captain of the rugby team was thrown into my room completely naked. there was a marauding mob outside my window making a noise and i was pretty much put out by this. and then they carried him upstairs and threw him into another room, still naked. i went to see the dean of my college and i said, this is not on. and he said, "emma, boys will be boys." that must have got your goat?

i stewed on it. i decided to write an article for the guardian's women's page and they lapped it up. presumably you were paid? yes, but i used a pseudonym because i didn't want to get in trouble. it taught me the power, if you need to speak truth to power, like the college authorities, there is a way of doing it. you were foreign correspondent at the ft, joined the times and then became only the second female editor of the sunday times, so does being a woman make any difference? these days, no, not really. i imagine my management style is different to some of my predecessors. it may not be a gender thing? it may be in an era thing. when i was younger, i was asked to cover the soft stories, the social affairs stories, stories seen as female. it is not like that now. genuinely, my entire newsdesk is run by women.

although we have just admitted a man onto it and he starts in november. we have a lot of senior women working at the newsdesk. we have last week's edition of the sunday times. it does feel so familiar, the paper version is huge, and familiar and full of magazines. something to sit down with over breakfast and into lunch. how long do you think the print edition can exist? i think it will be around for a lot longer yet. the future is entirely digital but there is still a place for the print edition. i suspect it will be around for quite a lot longer. even though all our effort and energy now is focused very much on digital and how we dojournalism for the digital audience. in a way, that means the print project has to become even better, it has to be more beautiful, better laid out and it is already a thing of beauty, we have an excellent art director. but it needs to be a boutique

product, something maybe we charge a bit more for. but you think it is going to be all—digital? yes, completely. i wonder if the sundays will be the last to go as a print version. because there is a place of sitting around with them on a sunday? yes, in britain there is a strong tradition of sunday papers. i suspect you are more likely to see the newspapers going digital only monday to friday. not yet, but i think it will happen and maybe there is still a place on a sunday when people want to share the sections and enjoy the physical product. people talk to me about the physical product of the sunday times although my main focus is on digital. do you have a strategy which is trying to make it feel like sunday? yes and no.

yes, in the sense that i think the core value of the sunday times, which is it produces great investigations and exclusives, that is still something that resonates in digital. the core mission of what we are doing is investing in this high quality investigative journalism. that is the same but what we are doing differently in digital, we think about how we tell the stories, which audiences we are targeting and we think more closely about that, because we can and because we know so much more about the audiences than we used to. do you still see it as the job of the sunday times to set the news agenda in britain? yes, i do. if a sunday paper isn't doing that, it is not doing itsjob. by the time people get to sunday, they know what the news is, they are looking for something different from us, looking for something distinctive. they want us to give them the news, by coming up with our own exclusives

or they want to have us explain the news they are already aware of. i think our role is, in that sense, whether it is print or digital, the business of explaining the news but also breaking the news is the same. is there any discomfort, do you feel uncomfortable with the amount of power the british press still holds? i think it is healthy, i think it is good. i suppose it is good if it is truth to power? yes, if we weren't here... people complain about the press a lot, but if we were not here, they would miss us. no one else is holding power to account and it is something the sunday times has been doing for the last 200 years. obviously, notjust the sunday times. it is about how you hold that power to account, some people say, rupert murdoch, if they all got together and they could bring down the government.

do you think they could? they could bring down the government if the government deserved to be brought down. if you look at the kind of campaigns and the kind of stories we have done, going back over time, you can look to some of the famous campaigns the sunday times has run, including uncovering thalidomide, uncovering corruption at the heart of fifa, david walsh, thejournalist, uncovering lance armstrong as a drug cheat. more recently, we did a series of articles about how the government mishandled the beginning of the outbreak of the pandemic. if we didn't tell the stories, nobody else would do it and i see ourjob is letting people know what decisions are being made on their behalf by the people who run our lives. i do remember those extraordinary series of articles, 38 days in great britain walked into disaster.

do you think it marked the beginning of the end for boris johnson? there was a period every sunday you had a scoop about what was going on inside number ten? i suspect that had we not done the covid story things wouldn't necessarily have been that different now. the important thing about that story, what took me by surprise was the extent to which it resonated with people and also i was taken aback by the government's somewhat dishonest response to it. what was that? on the day that story came out, on the evening that story came out they issued a 2000 word rebuttal to the story. i think it had one minor correction it, but it was just was to try and stop at the people running the story. we then rebutted their rebuttal

and now when you look at what the government inquiries have said about what the government's response was in those early days, it pretty much backs up everything we reported on. have you had an audience with the new prime minister? i have, i have. did she call you into downing street? no, at the conservative party conference in birmingham and i went along for a coffee with my chief political editor. does that feel healthy in a democracy, is that right? it was very much a half an hour chat. obviously, there was quite a lot to talk about. i actually make a point of not going to meet members of the government too often. it is very useful as background, but i don't think it is helpful as an editor to cultivate to close a relationship with any of them. that is not what myjob is, myjob is to help them to account. absolutely. i guess a lot of what we are talking about in terms ofjournalism these days

is about the loss of trust. do you think the public, first of all when it comes to scoops, appreciate old school, investigative journalism as you and i probably did when we were children? do you thinkjournalism is less appreciated now as a trade than it was? i think in some ways it is less appreciated. as a society we don't talk enough about the value of a free press and the importance of free speech but also a press that is able to operate freely and shine a light on what governments and people in power are getting up to. i think on the one hand, it is not as appreciated as it was, but the advent of fake news, social media and the noise that is out there means that people do still come to the trusted brands. whenever there is a big new story, the pandemic, ukraine and recently the mini

budget, people come to us and in a moment of big, big news, people still come to us. there is still a value, a lot of trust wrapped up in that sunday times masthead. it is a well worn path, from the sunday times editor, to editor of the times, would you want thatjob? why wouldn't i? there is a new editor of the times, tony gallagher, he will do a fantasticjob. some people tell me you are too left wing to be allowed to be editor of the times? that is annoying trope, i am just a journalist, i like good stories and that is what we get on with. fantastic and many good stories to come. that is all we have got time for today, thank you so much tojohn simpson and emma tucker, editor of the sunday times he was here in the studio. all editions of the media show

are on bbc sounds and the iplayer, but for now, thank you so much for watching. goodbye. hello. after a showery saturday, sunday is looking like a drier day across much of the uk. still a few early showers in northern england, northern ireland, especially in scotland, although these are going to fade away, though still some in the northern isles for the afternoon. but for much of the uk for much of the day, it'll be dry with sunny spells. cloud increasing later in the afternoon across southern england, perhaps south wales, with uncertainty about the speed of progression. some outbreaks of showery rain starting to move in. temperatures pretty much where they're going to be over the next several days. very wet in northern ireland during the evening. wet and windy weather sweeping north and east across the uk overnight and into monday morning. then on monday, any early rain will clear away from south east england and east anglia. after a much milder start to the day, closer to the area of low pressure on monday,

it's northern areas that will see the strongest winds. further showers for northern ireland and northern england but particularly in scotland that will bear the brunt of the heaviest downpours, especially north of the central belt. perhaps a degree or so higher, the temperature on monday.

good morning. welcome to breakfast, with rogerjohnson and nina warhurst. our headlines today: the prime minister will hold talks her new chancellor, jeremy hunt, today as the government tries to salvage its economic credibility. it comes as the governor of the bank of england, andrew bailey, warns that interest rates may need to rise by more than previously expected. the manchester united forward mason greenwood is charged with attempted rape, controlling and coercive behaviour, and assault. the dream start for england at the rugby league world cup. they open the tournament with a thumping win over samoa

at st james�*s park in newcastle.