Saturday 5 September 2015

And on it goes...


Here's another example of the kind of reporting Jonathan Munro had in mind:

BBC reporter Matthew Price has received a fair number of highly complimentary tweets from people on Twitter praising his interview with Hamza, a mother-of-three from Homs, on yesterday's Today. Several of them said they found it moving. 

Hamza and her family had taken four years to reach Hungary and now intend to get to Germany. After leaving Homs for Damascus, they had initially moved to Lebanon and then on to Turkey:
We left Lebanon to Turkey. We tried to go something in Turkey but the language is to difficult to learn, we don't have any job and the houses...the rent is too high and the people, they hate Syrians.
They then left on a dinghy for Greece.

Matthew Price didn't pick up on her admission that there were economic reasons why the family chose to leave the safety of Turkey ("the rent is too high") but asked instead about how she'd got where she'd got, about the crossing by dinghy, about whether her daughter can swim, about how she feels about how she's being treated in Hungary, etc.

She wept at a couple of points during the interview - once at the unfriendly treatment she felt she was getting from the Hungarians and once as she expressed the hope that she could, in time, bring the rest of her family (her brothers, mother and father) from Syria.

The image chosen to illustrate the story on the Today website was this one:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.