BBC’s Lyse Doucet: ‘I realised there was a story to be told from the ground up’

The BBC’s chief international correspondent on the human cost of the Syria and Gaza conflicts, and the dangers facing reporters

 The BBC's Lyse Doucet: 'We are trying to tell a very old Middle East story in a new way.' Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Lyse Doucet is an award-winning BBC foreign correspondent who has been working in the field for more than 30 years and covering the Middle East for the past two decades.

However, even with this wealth of experience, the BBC’s chief international correspondent admits the targeting of civilians, and in particular children, she has witnessed over the past two years in Syria and Gaza has prompted “an editorial shift in my journalism”, evident in last month’s BBC2 documentary The Children of Syria. Doucet is already working on a follow-up based on her experience of reporting from Gaza during the Israeli onslaught this summer.

“The way the wars of our time are fought, as punishing, sustained attacks on neighbourhoods, towns, cities, means assaults on families and childhood,” Doucet says. “Most places I cover young children are everywhere, in Gaza they are pouring out of every crevice.”

Doucet, despite all her foreign reporting experience, is also shaken by Islamic State’s brutal use of journalist hostages for propaganda purposes, with the online distribution of videos of the beheadings of the Americans James Foley and Steven Sotloff followed last week by British photographer John Cantlie being forced to deliver a filmed message on behalf of the group.

“We’re seen as ransom. It’s a whole new thing, extremely risky to have contact, they are beyond the pale now and just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does,” she comments.

We discuss the aftermath of the beheadings by Islamic State and the risks faced by freelance journalists covering conflicts. “With the internet eyes are everywhere ... You just can’t go into a war zone. That is sheer folly.”

Doucet talks about how covering the civil war in Syria shifted her focus towards the impact of such conflicts on children. An encounter at a checkpoint in Damascus with a mother and boy running with groceries proved pivotal.

“I asked ‘how are things?’ The boy, 12, suddenly said: ‘Tell her the truth, tell her they are bombing us every night, tell her that we are scared.’ I was so taken aback,” she recalls.

“In these crises, they are no longer the kids caught in the crossfire, they are the centre. We saw that in Gaza too. I began to realise there was a story to be told from the ground up. Just do the children.

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“By listening to them now you would not just have a political, emotional and social map of Syria, you would also have a compass of what Syria is going to be like in the future.”

This epiphany led directly to The Children of Syria, broadcast in August, which showed the devastating effect of the war through the prism of six different children’s experiences.

Doucet intends to take a similar approach with her documentary on Gaza. “I keep thinking of the children, the families we spent time with there. I don’t get nightmares, but we are going back and following some of the stories.”

She is cagey about saying too much but explains: “We are trying to tell a very old Middle East story in a new way.”

This will include the impact on both sides, a method established in Children of Syria, which included two heavily politicised boys, one an Alawite in Damascus, another in a refugee camp on the Turkish border.

Doucet says she believes in being “compassionate, not emotional”, suggesting she would not go so far as Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow’s anguished online video about the children of Gaza. “Empathy is a good thing. [But viewers] don’t want to see me, or anyone falling apart. It is not about us.”

Doucet’s blend of authority and compassion has seen her career progress from World Service freelancer to BBC correspondent, mixing reporting stints in the field with presenting turns on its Newshour show and the World News TV channel, and frequent Newsnight contributions.

In August she guest-presented a special Gaza edition of the BBC2 current affairs flagship – “I loved it” – but a more regular role looks unlikely anytime soon, with Evan Davis about to replace Jeremy Paxman as lead anchor.

“If there ever came a time someone said Lyse Doucet could do that, I’d certainly consider it,” she reflects. “But they have a very strong stable of presenters already, they don’t need me in their ranks.”

Doucet began her broadcasting career in 1983, as a freelancer in Ivory Coast. The BBC was setting up a bureau to serve West Africa, the stepping stone to being deployed for the next 12 years in Pakistan, Afghanistan, then Iran, Jordan, and Israel, picking up Persian and some Arabic alongside French.

Her approach in these male-dominated cultures includes being extremely polite. “Journalism is an excuse for bad manners,” she says, but “respect is a very important quality to have. It doesn’t mean taking someone’s side or being too nice to them. I have been in cultures where people have a very strong sense of self – where people are extremely sensitive to arrogance or any assumption of superiority.”

Are women still short-changed at the BBC? “People often feel they are overlooked,” she replies. Did she ever feel overlooked? “I was a bit odd. Odd accent, odd name.”

Doucet’s distinctive voice can be traced back to her childhood in the eastern Canadian province of New Brunswick, where she grew up in an anglophone family, but one descended from Acadian colonists from France.

“The accent issue used to be around. I began in 1983 when they were just allowing the Scots and Welsh to read the news. Britain was a much different country,” she says. “Every four years I’d have to go on the BBC Feedback programme just to answer that [accent] question. It hasn’t happened for quite time now.”

The World Service is currently in the middle of a merger with BBC News. There are “many, many more accents” on air in the UK as locally based BBC correspondents are shared. But budget cuts and turmoil are in evidence, and the merged operation is only just starting. “We have to wait and see. If it is all funded by the British licence fee payers they have to understand the importance [of the World Service].” Doucet quotes Kofi Annan’s view: “It’s Britain’s greatest gift to the world.”

“The thing is international news is no longer foreign. It’s down your street, it is in your house, in your office,” she adds. “You have to understand. Ebola victims are arriving here. Jihadis from Britain are in Syria and Iraq, these are no longer foreign stories, these are British stories. People are coming in fridges to the shores of Britain. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Our world is moving together now in tragic ways.”

Curriculum vitae

Age 55

Education Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, BA arts; University of Toronto, MA in international affairs

Career 1983-88 Freelancer, West Africa, BBC and Canadian media 1988-89 BBC correspondent in Pakistan, then Afghanistan 1989-93 BBC correspondent in Islamabad, also reporting from Iran 1994 Opened BBC office in Jordan 1995-99Based in Jerusalem 1999 Joins BBC team of presenters plus reporting from the field 2008 Georgian-Russian war 2010 Tunisia, Egypt and Libya 2011 Syrian uprising 2012 Appointed BBC’s chief international correspondent 2014 BBC2 documentary Children of Syria; OBE for services to British broadcasting

Maggie Brown

The Guardian 21 september 2014