REPORTER COVERS USA
Nick Bryant
As a new era begins in American politics, BBC New York correspondent NICK BRYANT shares with Emily Bright his recollections of covering the good and the bad of life in the US
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HROUGHOUT his US election campaign, Joe Biden vowed to ‘restore the soul of America’. The voters decided that they wanted him to undertake that task when they elected him as their 46th president, giving him the responsibility to ‘preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States’. At his side will be Kamala Harris, who made history as the first woman, and first black and Asian American, to be elected as vicepresident. The scale of the task that the two newly elected figureheads face was brought home two weeks ago by the storming of the US Capitol, the symbolic heart of American democracy, by some pro-Trump supporters. The news reports of that action shocked many around the world. 8 • WAR CRY • 23 January 2021
Among those reporting on the events was Nick Bryant. As the BBC’s Washington correspondent from 1998 to 2003 and New York correspondent for the past seven and a half years, Nick is well versed in American political life. He expects that Biden’s presidency will be ‘the soft jazz after the heavy metal of the Trump years’. But he adds that significant challenges lie ahead for the incoming president. ‘Joe Biden has said that he’ll try to heal this deeply divided country, but that’s a real problem right now. People can’t even agree on a set of facts,’ he says. ‘The disputed election was a case in point. There are still millions of Republicans who believe that the election was rigged, even though the Trump White House has not been able to substantiate
any of its claims of fraud. So you have two very different realities, underlining and creating this sense of two Americas.’ Nick’s experience as a BBC correspondent, spanning 25 years, has equipped him to deliver insightful and authoritative accounts of such world events. He began his career working at the Evening Standard, and then worked at the Daily Mail for a year before joining the BBC trainee scheme in 1995. Four days after joining the scheme, he received an unexpected phone call. ‘I just happened to be home on a Saturday night, watching Match of the Day,’ he remembers. ‘It was the time before mobiles, and they were ringing other correspondents, but no one was home. It was the night Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. It was