14/10/2016 Newswatch

travel between the two countries. More news at the top of the hour,

but first, here is News watch. Hello and welcome to News watch.

More than five years into the destruction and suffering of the

Syrian civil war, are we getting a full picture of the conflict? We

speak to the BBC Middle East editor about the challenges of reporting on

such a harrowing conflict. He is a contemporary chronicler. It was the

voice of a new Nobel laureate for literature or a bad impersonator?

First, it was surprising to hear on Thursday that the top story on many

bulletins was about Marmite. At least it until it became clear

was... Brexit was the real story. The spread was one of the number of

brands withdrawn from the Tesco online site after a dispute over

prices with a supplier, pointing to the sharp drop in the Valley of the

pound which many attributed to the government permitted that Britain

would leave the EU. The story the BBC brook which disclosed

negotiations between Unilever and Tesco caused a significant drop in

shares of both companies. There was panic buying of goods in a certain

stories. The news last week and was dominated by the release of the

video in which Donald Trump boasted that his fame meant he could do

anything to women. Other comments made by the US presidential...

Comments were summarised. News reports used the term is groping and

lewd behaviour. What Donald Trump did was to claim he repeatedly uses

his powerful position to harass and assault women. He said he just

walked up to them and kissed them were grabbed them. If this were

true, it would constitute sexual assault. To say that trouble boasted

of sexual assault would certainly enrage him. But that is what he has

done. To refrain from describing it in those terms is to commit an act

of cowardice. It is to accept a misogynistic linguistic framing and

it is to betray victims who need to hear that there is recourse in law

for this kind of behaviour. The announcement on Thursday that Bob

Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for literature caused much discussion.

Art is their exquisite literature? After watching the news at six, some

viewers were wondering if Bob Dylan was really Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan,

like Shakespeare, has the knack for coin a phrase which becomes part of

everyday speech. He has his own sense of meter and rhyme, metaphor

and meaning. He is a contemporary chronicler, storyteller, moralist

and poet whose work and words have changed attitudes and lives. Now,

his vocal style is not exactly classical but those who sing as

badly as that? No, because as one person on Twitter product, the last

20 seconds on the Nobel Prize featured footage of not the man

himself but a Dylan impersonator. Keith added, what a shame that the

film footage concluded with someone doing a third rate impression of the

great man. BBC News held their hands up to the mystic to us at the end of

the Bob Dylan package some archive footage which had been incorrectly

labelled as him was used. This was a production error which was rectified

for the ten o'clock news. Now, since the ceasefire as stored in Syria

broke down, the second city, a level, has been under intense

bombardment. Political and diplomatic arguments have raged for

whom there is responsibility and how it might be resolved. After five

years of war, a solution seems further away than ever. During the

recent deposit fighting, our Middle East editor, reported from Aleppo. I

couldn't cross into eastern Aleppo. This was close to the front line in

the old city, a tangle of medieval alleys that used to be the greatest

souk in the Levant. The old city was an extraordinary human creation, now

it is empty and dead. Nature of child was leaving hospital for his

new life. It will be without his arm and without his four cousins who

were killed when he was wounded. For reasons of logistics and 70, media

access to Syria has been irregular and difficult and some viewers have

told us they are concerned that the BBC is providing an incomplete or

even distorted view of the conflict. There is much reporting on the

terrible bombing in Aleppo in rebel held areas, but I am also interested

in what is happening to civilians on the Syrian army side. What people on

the opposite side think of their government's actions and what

attacks rebels and terrorist groups are making on the Syrian army held

areas. A more rounded reporting of the situation from different

perspectives is needed to better understand the crisis. And Clive put

it like this, the footage shown is almost exclusively from the eastern

Aleppo rebel side without a mention that there are government areas with

civilian victims of shelling or suicide bombing on a regular basis,

mainly children are selected for maximum emotional effect when the

majority of casualties are adults, including many Cine jihadists. Well,

to discuss the challenges of reporting from Syria, Jeremie Boga

joins us now from Cardiff. Most reports that we get here tend to be

from the rebel side. How far do you try to get access to the government

side? Most of the reporting I have done since I went after the war

started has been from the government side. They are basically two ways of

getting into Syria since the war began. One is with the Visa and

reporting from the government side in the main and the other way in and

was mainly over the Turkish border without a visa onto the rebel side.

That access is almost ceased because it is too dangerous. The chances of

running into jihadists Pujara journalists are very great. They

kidnap rate is enormous. When I report from Syria, I am reporting

from the government side. The worry I have had is that I have not been

able to report from the rebel held side and that when we use pictures

from the rebel side it is pictures we have sourced ourselves rather

than directly filming them ourselves. Those are some of the

most distressing images. Some viewers are concerned that we are

getting a distorted view of the conflict. We get this footage coming

from the rebel side of casualties. The message being the bombs are

being dropped by Russians and Syrians. What is your view? There

are distressing pictures from both sides. In that clip of mine, the

wounded boy, he lived in government-held territory and was

hurt by a shell that, his family said, came from a place held by the

jihadists of Islamic State. It is representative, I think, to use

pictures of children. They can be more shocking, but war is shocking.

War is barbaric. There is a difficult issue about what we

should. There is also a concern of when you shall such distressing

images, of viewers feeling hopeless about it, also a fear of the

desensitising with this torrent of distressing images. I think it is up

to people like myself to report in such a way that people don't get

desensitised. The argument about how much blood and gore reality to show

is one we have constantly. It is a constant discussion and I have had

many discussions over many years from many waters with programme

editors about how much we show. Generally speaking, the people in

the field want to show more than the people who edit the programmes are

prepared to show and in an ideal world you get some sort of a happy

medium between the two. Yes, it is shocking, but it is real. One other

concern we have heard, and I have heard it expressed by former

diplomats, is that the introductions to news items about Syria often

oversimplify and they talk about rebels versus Assad and Russia, but

the reality is more conjugated with many jihadists groups on the ground.

How does it look to you? The news should not be about good people

versus bad people. An injury gives you a flavour and it is not the

whole story. You have to take the hole. We have to take the whole in

more than one piece because I try to look at the number of pieces I have

done from one reporting trip rather than one individual report. That is

difficult because not everybody watches the news with the same

obsessive seems that journalists do, but you cannot get everything in

every piece. What I try to do and this is the challenge of TV

reporting, I tried to do a story which has got something in it with

someone who is interested but doesn't know much will get and learn

something and come away a bit wiser. It will also, at the same time, have

something in it that the top diplomat at the Foreign Office who

deals with the Middle East might get and find interesting as well. It

needs to be like a layer cake. That is not an easy thing to do. You need

good material. He have to be careful with your words and good interviews

and sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don't. Finally, when

presenters read the headlines on a busy news programme that open assume

that the pictures being run by the studio Gallery their relation to the

words they are saying. It doesn't always work out like that. This is

breakfast. It is half six, it is Friday the 14th of October. We will

be joined by Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and we will talk to

her about plans for a second referendum on independence. We have

clearly run at the wrong pictures over that particular sequence. My

apologies. Restore it we will be talking about later is about the

escaped gorilla at London zoo. Many of those who spotted that trip to

Twitter with Sean posting this. The sturgeon gorilla gaffe must be

irrefutable evidence of BBC bias. Thank you for all of your comments.

If you want to share your opinions on BBC News and current affairs you

can call us on... You can find us on Twitter and to have a look at our

website. The address is on the screen. We will be back to hear your

thoughts about BBC News coverage again next week.