I was enroute from London to Port au Prince to meet a group of nuns and other female social activists when I first really understood the significance, privilege and the responsibility of being a BBC journalist. About to transfer flights in Caracas, I learned that the Haitian border had been closed again and that I’d have to find a new route into the country via the Dominican Republic.
It was the summer of 1994. Haiti’s former-priest-elected-President, Jean Baptiste Aristide, was in exile and, following unsuccessful negotiations brokered by the UN and the OAS aimed at getting the military junta to step down, there were rumblings of an imminent military intervention.
I landed in Santo Domingo the next day with a cobbled-together plan to get a taxi to a border town from where I might be able to walk into Haiti but instead was met by a crowd of people who had heard there was a BBC journalist on board. They included a representative from Christian Aid’s women’s section, local NGOs and even the Haitian ambassador himself – all there to offer me their support in getting to my interviewees because, in short, they trusted the BBC to report not just “the” story but their story.
It’s important to say that my arrival on location hasn’t always been so welcome, but this experience early in my career impressed upon me both the reach of the BBC and its international reputation as a trusted provider of news and information.
Those are things we should all be proud of and continue to strive for.
And now, as part of the process of the BBC’s charter review, we all have an opportunity to contribute to and influence what kind of content and programming we want the BBC to make and prioritise in the future.
You can do this by replying to the Department for Culture Media and Sport’s (DCMS) public survey.
There are 32 questions, but you don’t have to answer them all. The questions cover everything from the licence fee to regulation of the industry to workplace standards. While all of these are important, from the Sandford St Martin Trust’s perspective, I suggest you consider the questions highlighted in our briefing which could most directly apply to the BBC’s representation of faith communities and its contribution to the better public understanding of religions and how they shape human experience.
The BBC is by no means perfect, but it plays an important role in supporting democracy and representing the diversity and plurality of our communities. And it’s ours. Consider this an opportunity to help make it better.
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