Getting arrested, and telling the story

AS USUAL, THESE ARE MARK'S VIEWS ALONE. NOT HIS EMPLOYERS' VIEWS.

A very distinguished journalist and former colleague of mine, John Simpson, the BBC's Foreign Editor, managed to get arrested over the weekend in Tehran trying to cover the protests.

This wouldn't have scared John. In fact, he always relished an event which promoted his profile (although he will hate me for saying this). But he's a dedicated public service broadcaster with few rivals in excellence, experience and commitment, and he's been arrested so many times in so many troubled countries he's probably lost count.

And immediately following his release, he made sure his team's filming was more "covert", and the BBC News coverage of the aftermath of the Iranian election, and the vote-counting process which more befitted the books of a corrupt and clinging Wall Street derivatives trader than a national electoral system, was the best available in America.

For the record, both WETA and WHUT in Washington carried his accounts. I turned to CNN tonight and, as usual, Wolf had a lot of scary scenes graphically recreated in the studio behind him, but all the footage (B-Roll) they showed was from the uprising in 1979. CNN has many courageous reporters, too (Christiane Amanpour is one) and so do the networks. Let us hope the ban on coverage of burning vehicles doesn't lead us to desert the story of what the Iranian people really want from their government. Already, NBC's war guy Richard Engel has been parachuted back from Iran to the Rockefeller Center to do MSNBC's Olberman, The Today Show, and who knows......Law and Order?

Let's hope the TV and Radio network accountants don't pull the plug on this story, possibly the most significant political change on foreign shores since the overthrow of Communism.

Do the TV Networks, and NPR, still have the resources, news judgment, or commitment to what is significant?

As usual, a generation yearns to be educated. And I don't mean the Iranians......