THE search for light lies behind her approach to journalism, Mishal Husain, the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, said this week.
“The Today programme is really known for the cut and thrust of pretty heated debate,” she said. “But we all need our own personal mantra to live by. And when I thought about what would sum up my approach to my work, it was this idea of searching for light rather than heat.”
She continued: “That’s not to say that heated debate isn’t part of what I do . . . but at the back of my mind, and actually very often also in the forefront of my mind, it is that idea of trying to shine a light, trying to search for new information.”
Every interview should be a discovery. “When it ends up in more heat than light, that is sometimes for good reason, because the person you’re talking to is answering a different question to the one you asked.”
Ms Husain was speaking at the second St Martin-in-the-Fields autumn lecture, as part of a series, “What Am I living for? The search for meaning”.
There were times when she had to “summon courage” to pose particularly difficult questions, she said, referring to the state visit of Aung San Suu Kyi, in 2013, when news of the persecution of the Rohingya people was just emerging.
“No one had really asked her about the Rohingyas, and I thought, well, somewhere in this conversation, I am going to ask her . . . and it was one of those moments where the atmosphere completely changes in the room, and things become a lot more icy, because you’ve brought something up that the person would really rather you didn’t go there.”
She also referred to visiting the school in Peshawar that had been bombed by the Taliban in 2014. She was picked out of a group of journalists at the school gates to go inside.
“I remember thinking: I’ve got one shot at this. No one other than the army has seen what I’m about to see, and I’ve just got to record it for television and for radio at the same time, and just talk about what I see. And it was such a searing experience.”
Ms Husain referred directly to her Muslim faith as a motivation for her journalism. “The search for knowledge is an intrinsic part of my faith,” she said. “‘Read in the Name of your Lord’ is the first instruction that we’re told was given by the angel Gabriel when he appeared before the Prophet Muhammad. . . So that search for knowledge is, I think, absolutely part and parcel of my professional life and indeed my faith as well.”
She grew up with positive examples of faith. “My mother has a very, very strong faith. My father was a product of a very devout Catholic mother and an equally devout Muslim father who lived their lives in perfect harmony, because, as my grandfather explained to me years later, ‘We understood each other perfectly.’”
He would drive his wife to mass, and she accompanied him on the haj. “I reckon she’s probably one of the few Catholics who have actually, God rest her soul, performed the haj. So I did grow up with very positive examples of faith in my life. And I think that it is part of not only why but how I do my job.”
Ms Husain was asked by the chairman, Mike Wooldridge, a former religious-affairs correspondent of the BBC, how she came to terms with the suffering she witnesses in her job. “I struggle with that . . . to find meaning in those kinds of very dark, dark moments,” she said. “You have to believe that something better will emerge.”
She referred to the challenge of becoming the first Muslim presenter on Today, in 2013. “I seem to remember there was one headline at the time that was something about me being ‘a Muslim presenter in the age of ISIS’, and I thought, that’s quite a backdrop to your daily job.”
But it had opened doors to helping to foster an understanding of Islam. “I’m not at all saying that I feel like I’m an expert on these things, because I’m on my own journey of discovery,” she said. But it was important “to think about the what the Qur’an says or doesn’t say, to think really hard about meaning and context and historical reference”.
Where Ms Husain was overt about her faith, the BBC’s Religion Editor, Aleem Maqbool, refused to be drawn. “The reason I avoid that subject is because I am the religion editor, and [just as] a political editor should steer away from their own politics, I think I should probably steer away from my own faith,” he said.
He had chosen to talk about the search for “shade”, in contrast to Ms Husain, to indicate that he thought he could make a difference only in his own small patch, whether that was reporting from the United States or Pakistan, or more recently as Religion Editor.
He was fascinated by faith, and believed that religious leaders needed to be held to account just as much as political leaders. “There are those who wield influence, tremendous influence in some cases, and it is part of our role to hold people to account when others can’t.”
The third contributor to the panel was the veteran former Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, who said that he defined his journalistic career as the search for truth.
He referred to his father, a bishop. “I’ve never considered following his size-13 shoes into church to this day. My understanding of God is still evolving.” But his time as a cathedral chorister had been formative, he said. “I loved what went with it, and I still do. The paraphernalia of Christian worship has something for all the senses.”
Being a chorister had taught him the same teamwork as he took into a newsroom. “We all wanted to do the next report or get sent on the next expedition, just as when we were in the choir we all wanted to sing the next solo.” He wondered whether that was what had propelled him into journalism.
Mr Snow referred to one of the most challenging reporting jobs of his career, the Grenfell Tower disaster. It had been particularly painful because, just a few weeks previously, he had been a judge in the national schools debating competition, and had identified 12-year-old Firdaws Hashim as the clear winner. She died in the fire.
“In my search for truth, Grenfell takes us to the core of it,” he said. “Here, then, is a bit of truth we know perfectly well: that had the residents . . . had more upper-echelon jobs, and had their ethnicity been [different], that cladding would never have been left on the building.”
He concluded that journalists were there to help others by seeking truth. “I think we have a really important job,” he said. “People say, you’re supposed to be objective, stand apart . . . [But] I believe in getting involved. We owe it to all humanity, to get involved with everybody’s business, and make the world a better place. And I think that that is the guiding principle of good journalism.”
The lectures continue on Monday nights. www.smitf.org/lectures