Stephen John Sackur is the amiable, but no-nonsense journalist who hosted HARDtalk, a current affairs interview program on BBC World News and the BBC News Channel.
Too bad the BBC decided to axe such an addictive program featuring such insightful investigative journalism after nearly 30 years, which I so appreciated, and lately have been watching reruns.
Its demise was part of a 500-person layoff program. Ugh layoffs, I loathe them, especially in an area where I started my own career—journalism—first with the Atlantic City Press, then The Philadelphia Inquirer, before I went into PR.
Over the years host Stephen Safkur’s subjects have included the heads of NATO and OPEC, Shimon Peres, Gore Vidal and Richard Dawkins.
For HARDtalk he interviewed such guests as Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev and Hugo Chavez.
In 2015 I relished Safkur’s picking apart Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen’s super arrogance with cutting questions thrust always with that congenial smile at the crusty far-right French leader known for his fiery rhetoric against immigrants.
The other night I caught a repeat of Safkur skillfully, yet relentlessly interviewing former executive editor of The Washington Post Marty Baron.
This was soon after the paper’s owner decreed shortly before the last presidential election that there would no longer be editorial endorsements of presidential candidates.
Safkur pointedly asked Baron, who had run the paper’s newsroom from 2013 to 2021, why at the time he had tweeted “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
Baron Cites President
Baron had added that President Trump “will see this as an invitation to further intimidate” the paper’s owner, the financial mogul Jeff Bezos. And that the move represented “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” The paper was about to endorse Kamala Haris for President.
Safkur would keep probing Baron on this and on other journalistic subjects and issues, which was his style to keep drilling baby drill for details surrounding facts and nuance behind the news.
Cutting HARDtalk was part of the wider 500-person-layoff program that was announced as the corporation grappled with a deficit of £500M ($654M) amid tricky economic headwinds.
The BBC had urged government to provide more funding for global news, as it warned that Russia and China are filling gaps vacated by the World Service with “unchallenged propaganda.”
A Curse of Cuts
The closure of HARDtalk was part of the latest round of cuts to the hard-hit BBC News teams, which news boss Deborah Turness said will “help meet the BBC’s savings and reinvestment challenge.”
When the news broke, Sackur tweeted the demise or HARDtalk launched in 1997 was “depressing news for the BBC” for a show that stresses the “importance of independent, rigorous deeply-researched journalism.”
He pointed to interviews with the likes of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Hugo Chavez and Emmanuel Macron through the years.
A BBC spokeswoman said: “HARDtalk has done great work across the last 25 years, but we’ve had to make some tough decisions given the level of savings required and changing audience habits. People are coming to our news channel for live and breaking news, while across the whole of BBC News, we have hard-hitting long-form interviews and discussion on more platforms than ever, for instance via our global on-air editors, and our debate and discussion programs.”
She cited recent interviews with the deputy leader of Hamas and former UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron as evidence.
Damaging Assault!
National Union of Journalists General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet called the cuts a “damaging assault on journalism and news at a time when the UK needs greater plurality and diversity of news, and trust in journalism is under attack at home and abroad.”
“Some of these decisions represent comparatively modest savings yet will disproportionately undermine the breadth and range of news content the BBC currently provides,” she added. Her broadcasting organizer Laura Davison said the union will “unpack the detail of the proposals” and “bring together NUJ reps to consider next steps alongside the scale and impact of these damaging plans.
Tom Madden is an author who writes on many subjects, including his latest book Planetary Lifeguard, Blowing the Whistle on Climate Change, plus his weekly blog at MaddenMischief. When he’s not writing, he’s managing his public relations firm, TransMedia Group, together with his resourceful daughter, Adrienne Mazzone, who is president of the firm Madden started when he left NBC.
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