this is bbc news, the headlines. ukrainian president volodymyr zelensky says russia does not occupy the embattled city of bakhmut. it comes after conflicting reports of who is now in control of the eastern city. russian president putin had congratulated the wagner mercenary group of capturing the city. us presidentjoe biden says the united states is doing all it can to strengthen ukraine's defenses for its war with russia. it comes as the us announces a new package of military aid for ukraine. there are calls for the uk's home secretary suella braverman to be investigated — following claims she requesterd a private speed awareness course, to avoid points on her driving licence, after she was caught speeding last summer. after a historic victory

in northern ireland's council elections, sinn fein says the democratic unionist party must return to power—sharing government at stormont. sinn fein is now the largest in local government as well as the assembly. now on bbc news. the media show. hello and welcome to this edition of the media show, and this week? our guest needs very little introduction. jeremy bowen joined the bbc as a trainee journalist in 1984 and he is now bbc news's international editor, one of the bbc�*s most recognised faces. welcome to the show. thanks very much for having me. you have a new series for radio 4 called frontlines ofjournalism, billed as your reflections on the most difficult stories you have covered.

one of those is certainly ukraine. we heard the news that the afp journalist had died, killed, we're told, by russian artillery. he was 32—years—old and this is a conflict you know very closely. yes, he was killed somewhere in the east, somewhere near bakhmut, where i have spent quite a bit of time, i was there at the end of last year, these things are tragic and in all the years i have been doing this, i have known quite a few people who have been killed. i was reading his twitter account today and if you go back to me the first he has posted a video where he and some soldiers, who are accompanying him are lying down and he is describing them, and it is pure terror as artillery fire comes in. in those moments, and you must have been in those moments, they must be a decision to make about whether you stay?

when you are in a situation where shells are landing, you don't have a choice, you just have to put your head down and hope that none of them had year. i was in the war in grozny, chechnya in the winter of 94 and 95, and i got caught in an air strike, and i lay in the snow listening to the explosions all around thinking you are going to die now or you are going to suffer excruciating pain from being hit, i had a flakjacket and a helmet and i was hunkering down behind next to a sort of a 6—inch high curbstone because it was the only thing i could find, i could just hear these explosions that seem to go on for ages and at that point you don't have a choice, you just think please let us all be over and let it be ok at the end of it. when you are lying in the snow, do you have a moment to reflect on the situation you end up in and whether you regret being there? yes.

i remember thinking to myself you really messed up, you pushed it too far, you posted too far, we should not be hanging around anyway but we promised someone left, we had a freelance colleague working who had been giving us material and there had been airstrikes already, it was a square in the middle of the city, half the buildings were on fire, we were waiting for this guy to emerge and he was late, and after the airstrike we had 25 pieces of shrapnel in our vehicle, there are not many moments like that but my god when they happen you certainly do not forget them. how do they affect the decision—making that follows is your career continues to direct you towards war? for me, and i discussed this with colleagues who had similar trajectories over many years, i think when you start out you don't know what to expect, and then you get a massive burst of adrenaline and huge highs, some of those as well of course, but mostly highs, to begin with,

unless something awful happens to you, and the first war i went to in el salvador i thought i was in my own wall movie — my own wall movie, in the middle of thejungle, the middle of a city, drinking on the terrace afterwards, swapping war stories with all these other people and we all thought we were pretty cool probably, but quite soon i realised that the only reason for doing this is to have a strong journalistic imperative because often we would come into people's lives at their worst moments, the lowest ebbs, members of the familyjust killed and we would ask them about it. you have to have a good reason for doing that otherwise it is the worst kind of intrusive... i'm in the job by its very nature is highly intrusive at times and as time has gone by and friends of mine have been killed and i have seen awful things over many years,

i get no buzz whatsoever from being in that situation i try very hard to avoid being somewhere like that, and i have been working in ukraine with a very good team, and a lot of the time with a cameraman, fred scott, was about my age, early 60s, done all the things i have done over many many years and i'm telling you, the two of us, as soon as we get there, we want to get out, film what we have to do and get out of there. there has been this huge shift between the young man in el salvador and the slightly older man reporting an ukraine. has the job you are doing changed as well? some things never change, the fundamentals ofjournalism don't change, you still have to be accurate, you still have to be on time, you still have to hit your deadlines, be empathetic, that's very important, you still have to be impartial, particularly important for us guys at the bbc but the technical side

has changed unbelievably, the first time i went to afghanistan, when the soviets were leaving in 1989, we arrived there with one tonne of equipment and two engineers had to spend three days rewiring the tv station before we could consider trying to get our pictures out onto some failing soviet satellite. now, you do it all from a laptop basically. the technology you are using has changed and your attitude to the conflicts has changed, what about the journalistic content you are producing? do you find yourself in these dangerous places and feel pressure to be constantly feeding social media or digital output rather than working towards one report at the end of the day? i don't feel that. i don't feel that but i probably am somewhat insulated from those pressures because i have been doing this for years, i am very experienced, quite a long way up the food chain at the bbc and i tend to do what i think is right rather

than feeling pressure to do things i don't want to do. i think if you are in a really awful place, say bakhmut, and you have a mobile signal, i would not dream of tweeting that i was there, i don't want anyone to know i was there. i might tweet afterwards to say i was there, send out a few photos, i think there is a security issue not to do that. in terms of feeding lives, no, my view now after all these years is what i want to do, i believe more than ever, i believe in quality, not quantity. you describe some of the crucial relationships you do with this work including the immediate crew you are working with but almost always in war zones you will be in a place of conflict with the cooperation of at least one of the sides. how do you manage that relationship, particularly when you are in the heat of battle some of the people who are allowing you to be there are also helping

you, maybe they offer you with a drink, someone is injured and you help them, how do you manage that relationship? one of the things that have really changed, all groups, from little armed groups to governments are much tighter about control of the media and they want to somehow control the message so they do like to keep a very close eye and insist on lots of permissions, just getting to somewhere like bakhmut requires all sorts of permissions and permits to get in there in the first place, and that gives them quite a bit of power over you. one of the things you have to realise is we are fairly powerless, and you work around those structures. and sometimes it requires making compromises, if you are working in the libya in the days of gadhafi, syria, or other authoritarian places, you have to

work on their system, which involve sometimes a lot of schmoozing but you must not compromise what comes out of it which is the journalism, and if there are problems and things you can't see, it's very important to be transparent and say we could not get that because... i was going to ask you about that because you think the journalists are transparent enough around the relationships and system that is necessary for them to be there? do you think the consumers of news understand that is the equation? some people say people might find it more interesting if we actually went more into some of the process. i think we tend not to do that because we might think the process is a bit boring, it is not really why we're there, it is not about us, i feel that very strongly. but you have to, i mean there was a situation for example last year when the russians pulled

out of the southern part of ukraine in kherson and everybody wanted to get in and talk to inhabitants and see what it had been like, see what the situation was an ukrainian said no—one can go in, and they blocked the roads, that was because they were going around the city looking for collaborators and they did not like, they did not want us to touch on the fact that they could have been collaboration, so of course when they say you can't get in, everybody tries to get in. we got in, following a convoy. and they threaten to take away�*s people's press passes and they did take some away for a while, ukrainian guy who was working for one of the american newspapers had just been presented with some kind of medal of freedom and they took away his press card. i think they have given them all back, we lost one, maybe two for a few days. but it's a warning shot. yeah, a lot of it is about the personalities of the people that make the rules, that's what i mean about working around a system,

and you have to push the system, otherwise if you just do as you are told is a reporter, and you will get nowhere. your series for radio 4 is called the frontlines of journalism, and you explore your experiences covering war but you also explore some fundamental questions aboutjournalism, the pursuit of truth in particular, and when i was listening to the first few episodes, i was thinking, is there a problem here thatjournalists are wrestling with how to get to the truth and how to share it but perhaps this their audiences are perhaps not as concerned as they once were with what is true? i think that one consequence of the current media landscape and the media landscape we will have probably forever and developing in all kinds of different ways that we can't predict particularly is there is so much opinion flying around and social media is a series, can be a series of echo chambers and there is plenty of evidence, people like to listen and watch what they like. america is the best example of that,

if you are a trump supporter, you get all the stuff you need from fox and if you are on the other side of politics, if you watch msnbc, you are nodding and saying quite right, so that is not really, i'm mean there are aspects ofjournalism about it, but it is also about opinion. do you find a level of scepticism directed at yourjournalism tiring? it is a bit tedious but yes, i'm an honestjournalist, i do not make things up. there was an incident in ukraine last year when i was in a prone position and someone behind me stood up and there was a huge thing on twitter about how i was faking it and people did little memes. it was pathetic, and it was lies. you did engage with that, i remember you tweeting about it.

i did not engage to begin with but i saw something like 70,000 likes, and i thought i had to say something. i spoke to people here who know more about social media than i do, and i thought i had to say something, so i said look, this is not true, and you can say whatever you like about what i am doing but you are also insulting all the ukrainians, because there were being people killed there that day trying to escape that shelling. and if you want to ridicule them by implication, you are welcome to, but i think some of the people do it because theyjust like lampooning, and there was an agenda which is they don't believe the kinds of things that we do. one of the ways that you counter that which you have alluded to is being more transparent, coming to show how you have produced the journalism that you have. we have to do more of that, and we have always done a bit about. as a goal i understand it

but in practical terms, what does it mean? how do you do that within the constraints of how journalism is produced, whether it is on the news at ten or the bbc news website or a tweet or all the sorts of places you appear? in broadcastjournalism and in daily television news, which is where i've spent most of my time doing on the bbc, there are lots of constraints. the amount of air time you have is one, access is another. you can't put the piece together if you have not got the pictures, and when you have got the pictures, if you don't have a decent slot, you can't get everything out, so you don't want to go into all the stuff about how you got your accreditation. i don't think so. maybe there is a place without an accompanying social media message or website piece, but if there is something you want to see in and you are stopped from seeing it or they try to manipulate what you are doing you need to expose that.

i think you need to say we wanted to get to x village, but we weren't allowed to. but we were able to see this, and the problem with this, well, what can we learn from that? maybe we learn some aspects of the truth or when i interviewed that person, you need to show that maybe you might have a government minder next to you and it clearly affects the way people speak. so, there's several parts to this equation. there's the pursuit of truth, there's transparency but then, there's also impartiality, which you talk in detail within your series. yes. and you had a series of very interesting exchanges with a number of your guests. and one of the examples that was highlighted, notjust by you but some of the people who were speaking to you, was an article you wrote for the bbc in march about the iraq invasion of 20 years ago and you called it a "catastrophe." and you were maintaining this is an impartial conclusion and some of the people you are interviewing were saying, "hold on — this is an opinion," so how do you explain that difference?

well, i think that — it was all about the 20th anniversary of the invasion of iraq in 2003 and if on invasion plus one — one day, i'd said, "this is a catastrophe," it would've been, "oh, this is going to be a catastrophe" it would've been my opinion. but 20 years later, when you've seen the consequences of it unfold — and continue to unfold with terrible, terrible detail — then i think you're perfectly entitled to say, "yeah, it was a catastrophe". it turned iraq into an incubatorforjihadists. it resulted in the rise of isis. tens of thousands of — hundreds of thousands of people have died, etc, etc, etc. that's catastrophic. it's a catastrophe by any definition of the word, and i've used it repeatedly on air, deliberately. these words don't slip out. because people might think well, you can describe what's happened and then, you could let others decide what word should be attached to it. that the description is impartial but the addition of a single word steps into something more.

i think that in my role as the bbc international editor, it's my duty to sometimes to say, "well, actually, guys, two and two does equal four". and do you think you're in a position as a very senior editor to do that more than somejournalists? i think that's why some people at the bbc are called editors and some people aren't, yeah. i think that's — part of the thing that — not to bring in — i mean, i have loads of my own opinions. as i get older, i have even more of them! theyjust keep coming, do they? theyjust keep — it's funny, as you get older, these things happen — it's like baldness, itjust occurs. but the thing is that it's not my opinion. what i have to show is how i got to that conclusion and so, in that piece that i said it was a catastrophe, it was about 1500 or 1800 words basically describing why. so, iraq was one big story you covered. i would imagine the story

you covered the most in the last ten or so years is the conflict between the israelis and the palestinians and sometimes, when i'm watching your reports, i think, "there's history here whichjeremy perhaps doesn't have space to get into as day—to—day reporting" and if we as the bbc don't provide that, do we risk, in some ways, compromising our reporting by not providing that context? well, i've done loads on the israelis and the palestinians over the years now — in fact, the last ten years is probably more the consequences ofjihadists and things like that and syria and iraq, but history is really important. if you work in the middle east, history is alive there in a way that people in our country, i don't think, really get. so, how do you get into all of that? and the problem is you can't really always put in a sort of newsreel section, black and white, "well, this is how we got here, guys" because there isn't time. and also, i've found over the years that producers often find it's a bit boring and they say, "well, it's very well, jeremy,

but can we just snip out the archive section?". so, the way to do it is how you write it and how you talk to people. you — the way to, i think, to — in a news report — to get the correct kind of analysis and context in is by using the drive of the — i'm talking television news now — the drive of the pictures that you get from the event and maybe some archive, if you can work it in, combined with a very carefully worded script and carefully chosen clips which will enable you to tell the story and at the same time explain it, rather than say — i think mistakes happen sometimes when — and when i first was middle east editor about 15 years ago, people were doing — the editors thought — it was the first time anyone had the job and editors and programmes would say, "well, we've got a piece from so—and—so. "jeremy, can you do the explainer?"

so, isaid, "what, so, if you didn't get that, jeremy is now going to explain it?" so, my argument was always i should get the material and i should then build this construct, and that's what i try and do. it doesn't always work but i think when it does work, it works. and you mentioned that you've spent a lot of the last ten years talking aboutjihadists. some of those would've been in syria, particularly when the islamic state group was taking a lot of territory, and that leads me to something else i'd like to talk to you about which is your close encounters with really significant historical figures, one of them is president assad of syria. let's listen to a brief part of your exchange with him a few years back. what about barrel bombs? you don't deny that your forces use them. i know about the army. they use bullets, missiles and bombs. i haven't heard of army using barrels or maybe cooking pots. large barrels full of explosives and projectiles which are dropped from helicopters and explode with devastating effect. they're called bombs. there's been a lot of testimony about these things.

they're called bombs. we have bombs, missiles and bullets. so you would — but you wouldn't deny that included under the category of bombs are these barrel bombs, which are indiscriminate weapons. no, there's no indiscriminate weapons. how do you deal with it when you're doing an interview like that and the interviewee is simply refuting what you're saying? he's telling a lie. and in the series we've done, that exchange is actually in the programme which is called the big lie. well, you have to keep pushing. you have to be sure of your ground, you have to do be able to war game it a bit in advance. that interview with assad, we really war gamed it. we worked out, "well, he'll possibly say this. "and then, so, if he says this, well, you can answer — counter with that and bring out this proof or maybe this example," and so, working with others — you know, the team from hardtalk helped me out and did

a very good brief — so, you know, you get these things which you can push back at them. but yeah, if they're going to keep at it, they're going to keep at it. and in those moments on each side of the interview when you arrive, when you're packing up, both with president asaad but also gaddafi as well, can you learn things about how they interact with their colleagues, about how they carry themselves? absolutely. assad is incredibly polite in a sort of old world, courtly way. he'll leap to his feet when you get to the room. he'll break his neck to make sure he's not the first person through the door — "after you," and then, he always — i've interviewed him a few times — and he always gives you about ten or 15 minutes one on one beforehand, you have a little chat. gaddafi, on the other hand, you know, he swept in, the absolute caricature of his own image, you know, in a flowing ochre robe, aviator sunglasses, slightly spacey, at the head of a massive

convoy of vehicles. so, you know, it was almost like being in the room with his spitting image puppet. and in the case of those two men, you had also spent time reporting on the consequences of the actions of their government. considerable amount, yeah — and their victims. how did you square the two men who were in front of you, who was speaking to you with apparent conviction, and what you knew to be the cause of their instructions? well, i tried to use it against them. for example, with gaddafi, he was saying, "my people love me. "they love me all" — i remember him saying that. he said it in english. and i said, "well, hang on, a minute. "i was just earlier on today, people were out on the streets of tripoli and they were protesting". he said, "no, they were supporting me". i said, "no, they weren't. "they were saying �*down with gaddafi'". "no, they weren't." i actually think he believed in his own propaganda. he lived in a bubble.

but — so, i think you can try to use things you've seen but the great strength — one of the great strengths of being a reporter is that you have used your own eyes and your ears and you have proof that you can then show to people. you are getting close to events and people that we know war crimes tribunal, for example, are interested in — in looking at and it's starting to become more and more frequent that the work of journalists is being required in those kind of legal environments. is that something you're comfortable with, if requests come in from the international criminal court or...? i've testified at four separate trials in the former yugoslavia war crimes process, including mladic and karadzic, the bosnian serb leaders and i felt — you know, the great sort of cliches that reporters say is they say — people say, "why do you do it? they say, "well, bearing witness". well, i didn't say anything in the courtroom i wouldn't have said on air. i didn't give away any secrets, i didn't blow any contacts,

but what i did do was go into a lot of detail about what we reported and what we saw and, to be honest with you, if that helped put some of these war criminals behind bars, i'm delighted about it. so, you didn't feel that crossed the line into something where a journalist is seeking an outcome? well, it sounds like you were glad of the outcome. i was glad of the outcome. yeah, iwas, because i'd witnessed crimes of war. i'd seen people being killed on the orders of these people. so, yeah, of course i was, on a human level, very happy about it. not happy — i was satisfied that i had been part of a legal process which was as much as putting people in jail was about creating a record — and that, in a sense, is what we do. you know, anotherjournalistic cliche is it's the first draft of history. well, the millions of pages of evidence they accumulated at the war crimes tribunals are a massive resource for historians in the future, and my reporting is part of that because they accepted a lot

of what i did as evidence, and i think that was because my reporting was fairly done. jeremy, i'm afraid that's all we've got time for. to those of you watching, thank you very much indeed for being with us on this edition of the media show. you can hearjeremy�*s new series frontlines ofjournalism on the bbc sounds app. but from me and all of the media show team, bye—bye.

live from london, this is bbc news. ukraine's president zelensky rejects russia's claim that it is in control of the embattled city of bakhmut. translation: bakhmut is not occupied i by russian federation as of today. i there are no two or three interpretations of those words. president biden says the us will not waver in its support for ukraine as he confirms a new package of military aid. the g7 reaffirmed our shared and unwavering, i will say it again, our shared and unwavering commitment to stand with the brave people of ukraine. calls for the uk home secretary suella braverman to be investigated following claims she asked civil servants to help her avoid a speeding fine.