Since February 1996, Nik Gowing has been the main presenter on BBC World, the BBC’s 24-hour international TV news and information channel.
From 1996 to March 2000, Nik was principal anchor for the 90-minute weekday news programme The World Today, and its predecessor, NewsDesk. He was a founding presenter of Europe Direct and has been a guest anchor on both HARDtalk and Simpson’s World. He is also a regular moderator of the Sunday news analysis programme Dateline London.
Nik draws on both his extensive reporting experience over two decades in diplomacy, defence and international security, and his presentation and chairing skills. He has been a main anchor for much of BBC World’s coverage of major international crises including Kosovo in 1999, and the Iraq war in 2003.
Nik was on air for six hours shortly after the twin towers were hit in New York City on 11th September 2001 - BBC World’s coverage of the terrorist attacks on the US won the 2002 ‘Hotbird’ Award for the Best News Channel. He fronted coverage of the unfolding drama of Diana, Princess of Wales’ 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, 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 to 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 ITN’s 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 1980s, first as Foreign Affairs Correspondent, then Diplomatic Correspondent, Nik Gowing reported extensively from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. 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 and emergencies.
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 study challenged conventional wisdom of a 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 the media’s role in preventing conflict. Like the Harvard study, it received wide attention and stirred new international debate.
As a result of both studies and his constantly updated analysis of the relationship, Nik is regularly invited to participate in workshops and lecture to defence and international relations institutes, strategic studies and humanitarian affairs conferences, government departments, the UN agencies, military staff colleges, NGOs and humanitarian organisations.
In May 1998, he completed an 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 to 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 to 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 two steering committees - the British-German Konigswinter Committee and the Strategy Committee of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition at Harvard University.