FULLY BOOKED Insight with John Simpson: A free and independent press?

Talk Thursday 18th March, 2010
Part 1
Part 2


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Veteran BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson will be at the Frontline Club on the eve of the publication of his new book Unreliable Sources examining the British press and its reporting of key events throughout history.

John Simpson is the BBC’s World Affairs Editor and one of the world’s most experienced and authoritative journalists. He has covered many of the biggest stories of recent times from the Iranian revolution, to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia, the Gulf War and the wars in Bosnia, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and their overthrow in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

John Simpson has won a number of awards including three Baftas, a Golden Nymph award for his reporting of Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Iran and an International Emmy award for News Coverage for his report on the fall of Kabul for BBC ONE’s Ten O’Clock News in 2002 and an RTS award for his reporting during the invasion of Iraq.

His latest book Unreliable Sources: How the Twentieth Century Was Reported turns an eye to how Great Britain has been transformed by its free press and asks whether the press can ever be truly free and whether we would desire it to be so.

Unreliable Sources by John Simpson is published by Macmillan on 19 March.