|
|
|
MICHAEL BUERK is one of Britain’s leading broadcast journalists. He has worked as a BBC news correspondent and presenter for more than thirty years. He anchored the BBC’s main evening television news programme from 1989 to 2003. He continues to present the corporation’s news programmes in combination with several major television documentaries, news assignments overseas, radio series for BBC Radio 4 and presenting special events for the BBC. He chairs the Radio 4 programme on ethical issues the “Moral Maze” and the Radio 4 programme on individual dilemmas “The Choice”. Apart from broadcasting, he lectures on international issues and environmental matters and chairs conferences on current affairs and business issues. His autobiography “The Road Taken” was published by Hutchinson in September, 2004.
Apart from his role as a BBC newscaster, he is best known in Britain for presenting the peak time programme about emergencies “999”. The programme ran through 15 series between 1991 and 2002 and, for much of that time, was the BBC’s most popular factual television programme.
He is also known for his career as a foreign correspondent for the BBC during which he probably won more international awards for television reporting than any other British journalist. Several of them came from his coverage of the Ethiopian famine in 1984/5. His films alerted the world to the tragedy. They were shown worldwide to an audience of hundreds of millions (they were shown in the United States on the NBC network). They led directly to a massive international relief effort valued in billions of dollars, to Band Aid and Live Aid, which it is estimated saved over a million lives.
He was named Television Journalist of the Year by the Royal Television Society in 1985, and won a second Royal Television Society award that year for foreign reporting. He has won the British Academy for Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for factual broadcasting. He was given Europe’s premiere award for news and documentary television, the Monte Carlo Film and Television Festival Golden Nymph. In the United States, he won the George Polk and National Headliner awards, two of the three leading prizes for broadcast journalists. He was also honoured by the United Nations and the Roman Catholic church.
In 1988, he was the second recipient of the James Cameron memorial award for “work as a journalist that combined moral vision and professional integrity” in covering the township uprisings in South Africa while he was the BBC TV Africa correspondent, based in Johannesburg.
He was named Science Writer of the Year in 1989 for a documentary on the environmental destruction of Poland, The Poisoned Inheritance. In the 90s, the Voice of the Viewer and Listener Association honoured him for the “best individual contribution to British television, and the Broadcasting Press Guild named him Radio Broadcaster of the Year. Recently, he won the premier award for religious programmes in the United Kingdom with an edition of “The Choice”.
He has reported for the BBC in more than sixty countries; covered wars in the Middle East (1973), Cyprus (1974), El Salvador (1982), Tigre (1984), Uganda (1984), Angola (1985), Mozambique (1983-6), Sri Lanka (1987) Eritrea (1989), Ethiopia (1991), Somalia (1991/2) and the first Gulf war. He spent long periods in the 1970s reporting on the troubles in Northern Ireland. He was the BBC’s man in Buenos Aires during the Falklands war, and for four years. he was the BBC correspondent in South Africa at the violent climax of the struggle against apartheid.. He has covered political, diplomatic and economic developments from the North Slope of Alaska to Cape Horn, from Calcutta to Katowice.
He has fronted major events from Millennium night to Royal weddings for BBC TV. The television series he has done include Nature, Tobacco Wars, Soul of Britain, Future Watch, Hand of God. He has done many individual documentaries including editions of Panorama and Everyman.
Michael Buerk was born in Solihull, West Midlands. He trained on newspapers, starting on a local weekly and graduating to the Daily Mail. He worked for ITV and BBC radio and television before joining network news. He worked as a general reporter, as industrial and energy correspondents before taking on the role of top international “fireman” (then called special correspondent) and then worked as a foreign correspondent, based abroad.
He has doctorates from the universities of Bristol and Aston, and an MA from Bath university. In 1994 he was awarded the Mungo Park medal by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his work in Africa.
Michael Buerk is 64, married with twin sons, and lives in Guildford, Surrey. |
|
|
|
|