Since February 1996 Nik Gowing has been a main programme anchor for the BBC's 24-hour international TV news and information channel BBC World, produced by BBC News. The channel's global audience is more than 267 million in 200 countries.
He is now a main presenter on the news programmes re-launched in April 2000 transmitted at 1600, 1700, 1800 and 1900 GMT. He is also a regular moderator of the Sunday news analysis programme 'Dateline London'.
From 1996 to March 2000 Nik was principal anchor for the ninety-minute premium weekday news programme 'The World Today', and its predecessor 'NewsDesk'. He has been a founding presenter of 'Europe Direct' and has been a guest anchor on both 'HardTalk' and 'Simpson's World'.
Nik Gowing's appointment draws both on his extensive reporting experience over two decades in diplomacy, defence and international security and his presentation / chairing skills. He has been a principal programme anchor for much of BBC World's extended, continuous 24-hour/7-day week coverage of major international crises like Kosovo in 1999. In the 2003 Iraq war he anchored BBC News coverage across four BBC TV channels from near Central Command in Qatar. He was on air for six hours shortly after the twin towers were hit in New York City on 11 September 2001. This 9-11 coverage won the 2002 'Hotbird' award. He fronted coverage of the unfolding drama of Princess Diana's accident in Paris in August 1997 and made the announcement of her death to a global audience estimated at half a billion. He also anchors special location coverage of major international events like elections, and chairs BBC World Debates at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the annual Nobel Awards in Stockholm.
Before joining the BBC, Nik was a foreign affairs specialist and presenter at ITN for 18 years. From 1989-1996 he was Diplomatic Editor for the one-hour nightly news analysis programme Channel Four News from ITN in London . His reports were aired frequently by the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, NBC's SuperChannel and CNN International. His reporting from Bosnia was part of the Channel Four News portfolio which won the BAFTA 'Best News Coverage' award in 1996. His investigations confirming covert US weapons air drops into Tuzla and on the fall of Srebrenica were singled out for praise in the Independent Television Commission programme review for 1995.
Since 1978 Nik Gowing has reported from most of the main global conflicts. He was bureau chief in Rome (1979) and Warsaw (1980-83). He collected a BAFTA award for his exclusive coverage of martial law in Poland in 1981. In 1989 he broke the news that Russian troops were secretly leaving Afghanistan. He received an award from the New York TV Festival for his military and diplomatic analysis of the Gulf War.
During the 1980's, first as Foreign Affairs correspondent, then Diplomatic Correspondent, Nik Gowing reported extensively from Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. He was accredited in Warsaw and Prague. In 1989 he reported the revolutions marking the end of Communism, as well as the unrest in China. He remained an accredited correspondent in Moscow, where he reported the assault on the White House in 1993.
From 1991 he reported extensively on war in the former Yugoslavia with particular emphasis on diplomacy and the politico-military. His Channel Four documentary Diplomacy and Deceit on the limits and failures of diplomacy in conflict management was widely acclaimed.
Independently of his work for BBC News, Nik has developed a sought-after analytical expertise on the management of information in the new transparent environments of conflicts, crises, emergencies and times of tension.
In 1994 he was a resident fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy in the John F.Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His published Harvard study challenged conventional wisdom of an automatic cause and effect relationship between real-time television coverage of conflicts (the 'CNN factor') and the making of foreign policy.
His 1997 study for the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict in Washington DC has similarly challenged conventional wisdom on assumptions about a role for the media in preventing conflict. Like the Harvard study it has received wide attention and stirred new international debate.
As a result of both studies and his constantly updated analysis of the relationship he is regularly invited both to participate in workshops and lecture to defence/international relations institutes, strategic studies/humanitarian affairs conferences, government departments, the UN agencies, military staff colleges, NGO's and humanitarian organisations.
In May 1998, for example, he completed an extended, acclaimed study funded by the European Commission into the effect of information control on humanitarian organisations and the media in the Great Lakes Crisis of Central Africa October 1996 - May 1997. In September 1998 he was elected to the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House and served on the Executive Committee from 2000-2002. He is also a member of the Academic Council at the Wilton Park conference centre, the non-party vice chairman of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, a board member for the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe, a member of the Advisory Board for the University of Birmingham's Centre for Studies in Security and Diplomacy, and has been a Visiting Fellow in International Relations at Keele University in the UK. He is a founding committee member for the Rory Peck Trust which campaigns for the interests of freelance TV cameramen and women. He is a governor of the Ditchley Foundation, and a member of the steering committee of the British-German Konigswinter committee and the Strategy Committee of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition at Harvard University.