Reporting Faithfully

By Julia Bicknell

January 28, 2016

A veteran BBC journalist shares stories of Christian endurance around the world, including in her own profession.

JB: At the moment, something that gives me tremendous hope is that the place where I hear more, if you like, stories of hope and Christian engagement in the world, is actually not Christian media at all; it’s on a program on the BBC World Service, probably the most famous program, called Outlook Obviously my background and training as a journalist for over 30 years really helps me understand, but it’s so easy for someone to read something somewhere and just copy and paste it, instead of actually doing the rigour that I’ve learned and done every day, hopefully, of asking the big question about where a story originated Now, why don’t I use that expertise and try to find the people who are actually interested in that and who want my background and my analysis? Now if I’m looking to hire journalists, I really want someone who has this insatiable curiosity about the world and what it’s doing and why it’s doing it and how it’s doing it I taught journalism for a number of years on a part-time basis while I was still working in the mainstream media, and I always used to ask the class at the beginning of every term, What’s the most important tool a journalist has? You’d always get the laptop, the tape recorder, Google In that way it’s so contrary to the cliché of hardbitten, cynical journalism, isn’t it? Good journalism really is more a matter of faith than cynicism: you don’t know the answer, but you know there’s an approach to an answer The attitude is: How can you suggest that we’re anything like what’s happening in Iraq or any of those countries? Do you find that’s true, that we disqualify ourselves in advance from seeing ourselves as part of that continuum? One of the things I always did at the BBC was, if I met someone in the business who had a faith, make a point of having coffee with them, just sharing the kind of ethical and moral dilemmas that you would have with a story It’s much more about those kind of day-to-day personal things, isn’t it? You just need a bunch of people who get it, who are doing the same kind of job, know the same kind of pressures, and who are also trying to live as a Christian in the middle of that In a funny kind of way, I think, in Britain right now, there’s a little more openness to people being a committed Christian, believing, having a faith I don’t think it’s as simple as saying there’s the mainstream media and then there’s Christian media

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