Ben Brown is a journalist and news presenter for the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

's rolling news channel BBC News. He has also presented the BBC News at Six and the BBC News at Ten and is currently an occasional presenter on the BBC Weekend News

BBC Weekend News

BBC Weekend News is the national news programmes on BBC One at a weekend although it is often referred to on guides simply as BBC News, or if broadcast at 10pm exactly, BBC News at Ten...

on BBC One

BBC One

BBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...

. He also appears on the BBC News at Five

BBC News at Five

The BBC News at Five is an hour long news programme broadcast from Monday to Friday at 17:00 on the BBC News channel. The programme is fronted by BBC News at Ten anchor Huw Edwards from Monday-Thursday, the Friday edition is fronted by Gavin Esler...

, and BBC World News.

Early life

Born in Kent, Ben Brown was educated at the Sutton Valence School

Sutton Valence School

Sutton Valence School is an English independent school near Maidstone in southeast England. It has about 520 pupils. It is a co-educational school with a boarding option . The three boarding houses are Westminster, St Margaret's and Sutton and, for those in the first and second form, Beresford...

, an Independent school

Independent school

An independent school is a school that is independent in its finances and governance; it is not dependent upon national or local government for financing its operations, nor reliant on taxpayer contributions, and is instead funded by a combination of tuition charges, gifts, and in some cases the...

. During high school, Brown was on the debate team, and took second place in the national debating championships. He won an Open Scholarship to Keble College, Oxford

Oxford

The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...

, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, before graduating from the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies

Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies

The Cardiff School Of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University was founded in 1970 by Sir Tom Hopkinson and as such is the longest established postgraduate centre of journalism education in Europe...

 with a diploma with distinction. He joined Radio Clyde in Glasgow as a reporter, and later became a reporter for Radio City in Liverpool.

Reporting

In 1986, Ben joined Independent Radio News, covering major stories from superpower summits to the Hungerford massacre

Hungerford massacre

The Hungerford massacre occurred in Hungerford, Berkshire, England, on 19 August 1987. The gunman, 27-year-old Michael Robert Ryan, armed with two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, shot and killed sixteen people including his mother, and wounded fifteen others, then fatally shot himself...

. He joined BBC TV News two years later and was a Foreign Affairs Correspondent until 1991, reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Persian Gulf war, from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

He was appointed Moscow Correspondent in 1991, where he witnessed the final collapse of Communism and the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...

. He was at the Russian Parliament when troops loyal to President Boris Yeltsin

Boris Yeltsin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...

 stormed it in 1993, and the following year he was in Chechnya

Chechnya

The Chechen Republic , commonly referred to as Chechnya , also spelled Chechnia or Chechenia, sometimes referred to as Ichkeria , is a federal subject of Russia . It is located in the southeastern part of Europe in the Northern Caucasus mountains. The capital of the republic is the city of Grozny...

 for the start of the civil war. His coverage of that conflict won him several international prizes, including the Bayeux War Correspondent of the Year Award and the Golden Nymph Award from the Monte Carlo Television Festival.

In January 1995, Ben resumed his roving role as a Foreign Affairs Correspondent, based in London. He has covered the break-up of Yugoslavia extensively, reporting from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, where his stories helped to secure several awards for the BBC, including a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Award).

In 2001 he won the Bayeux War Correspondent Award for the second time for his coverage of the Intifada in Israel.

More recently, Ben was embedded with British troops in the Iraq war. Ben wrote about his experiences in a book, 'The Battle for Iraq', notably how a British soldier saved his life by opening fire on an Iraqi militiaman who was just about to shoot Ben in the back with a rocket-propelled grenade. Ben covered the first Gulf War in 1991, and his account of that, 'All Necessary Means', was also published.

In December 2010 Brown was criticised by viewers for adopting a "highly accusatory" tone during an interview he conducted on BBC News with Jody McIntyre, a political activist with cerebral palsy

Cerebral palsy

Cerebral palsy is an umbrella term encompassing a group of non-progressive, non-contagious motor conditions that cause physical disability in human development, chiefly in the various areas of body movement....

 who had been dragged from his wheelchair by Metropolitan police officers during a recent student protest march through London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

.

Other work

Brown wrote a novel based on his experiences of war reporting entitled Sandstealers. The novel was published in May 2009 by HarperCollins.

External links

• Short Biography at BBC World
  BBC World
  BBC World News is the BBC's international news and current affairs television channel. It has the largest audience of any BBC channel in the world...
  
    website
• "'Then she pulled me closer and started to sob uncontrollably on my shoulder' on a defining moment in the tsunami coverage" Ben Brown, The Observer, Jan. 16, 2005
• "War reporters hit back at tie jibes" Zoe Smith, Press Gazette, 3 August 2006