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Sue Lloyd Roberts
Jul. 3rd, 2011 05:05 amThe revolts and revolutions in the Arab world have brought back out of what seemed like retirement the closest thing that the BBC has to a truly great journalist: Sue Lloyd Roberts.
Ms.Roberts is now in her early sixties, but still in remarkable shape - and she would have to be; her kind of journalism requires, among other things, physical courage and alertness. A decade or two ago, she was the BBC's hard jobs woman. Nobody would be told where she was or what she was doing, until, every few weeks or months, she would come back from some incredibly closed and dangerous part of the world, from Red China to the slums of Glasgow, bringing with her reels of TV reports that were sure to make someone somewhere very angry. I used to look forward to her reports as to events, and they never disappointed.
One might wonder why she never became a star reporter in the sense of Richard Kapuszinsky or Oriana Fallaci. To my indignation, she does not even seem to have a Wikipedia entry. I imagine that the most important reason, to judge by the one interview I have been able to find, is that she is a genuinely modest person who takes herself without any particular seriousness. Indeed, in every way she seems a holdover from an earlier world, from her cut-glass private girls' school tones (Cheltenham and Oxford; any younger woman would have made an effort to achieve a Welsh accent) to the fact that she seems, if we take her seriously, to have fallen into journalism almost by chance, to her evident belief that journalists must practice without fear or favour and ask for nobody's permission. When compared to the outlets for tyrants or terrorist organizations that dominate the world of foreign reporters today, she hardly seems to belong to the same human race.
Well, her courage and her ability to turn up where she isn't supposed to go are certainly still there. While everyone else was simply reporting that Syria was closed to journalists and leaving it at that, she somehow turned up in the heart of Damascus and interviewed several opposition figures, most of whom allowed her to show their faces and identities. Her judgment does not, quite frankly, strike me as sufficiently discriminating: she is openly in favour of the rebels, accepts their own self-description as secular and tolerant fellows without questioning, and never seems to wonder why, if so, violence always peaks on Fridays after Mosque meetings.
I don't suppose one could expect everything. In an age of corrupt and cowardly journalism, when reporters not only seek the permission of the local powers but regularly employ stringers and cameramen from the same background, this elderly lady is still the best that we can get, and one cannot ask that she should also ask questions that nobody else, from the beginning of these revolts, has thought of asking.
Ms.Roberts is now in her early sixties, but still in remarkable shape - and she would have to be; her kind of journalism requires, among other things, physical courage and alertness. A decade or two ago, she was the BBC's hard jobs woman. Nobody would be told where she was or what she was doing, until, every few weeks or months, she would come back from some incredibly closed and dangerous part of the world, from Red China to the slums of Glasgow, bringing with her reels of TV reports that were sure to make someone somewhere very angry. I used to look forward to her reports as to events, and they never disappointed.
One might wonder why she never became a star reporter in the sense of Richard Kapuszinsky or Oriana Fallaci. To my indignation, she does not even seem to have a Wikipedia entry. I imagine that the most important reason, to judge by the one interview I have been able to find, is that she is a genuinely modest person who takes herself without any particular seriousness. Indeed, in every way she seems a holdover from an earlier world, from her cut-glass private girls' school tones (Cheltenham and Oxford; any younger woman would have made an effort to achieve a Welsh accent) to the fact that she seems, if we take her seriously, to have fallen into journalism almost by chance, to her evident belief that journalists must practice without fear or favour and ask for nobody's permission. When compared to the outlets for tyrants or terrorist organizations that dominate the world of foreign reporters today, she hardly seems to belong to the same human race.
Well, her courage and her ability to turn up where she isn't supposed to go are certainly still there. While everyone else was simply reporting that Syria was closed to journalists and leaving it at that, she somehow turned up in the heart of Damascus and interviewed several opposition figures, most of whom allowed her to show their faces and identities. Her judgment does not, quite frankly, strike me as sufficiently discriminating: she is openly in favour of the rebels, accepts their own self-description as secular and tolerant fellows without questioning, and never seems to wonder why, if so, violence always peaks on Fridays after Mosque meetings.
I don't suppose one could expect everything. In an age of corrupt and cowardly journalism, when reporters not only seek the permission of the local powers but regularly employ stringers and cameramen from the same background, this elderly lady is still the best that we can get, and one cannot ask that she should also ask questions that nobody else, from the beginning of these revolts, has thought of asking.
