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Martin Bell
Martin Bell, OBE (born 31 August 1938) is a British UNICEF (UNICEF UK) Ambassador, a former broadcast war reporter and former independent politician who became the Member of Parliament (MP) for Tatton from 1997 to 2001. He is sometimes known as "the man in the white suit".
As a BBC reporter, he pioneered an approach to journalism he later described as a "moral enterprise" informed by the individual journalist’s personal sense of “right and wrong", and which, as he put it, "cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor."
Bell is the son of author-farmer Adrian Bell, compiler of the first ever Times crossword. He is the brother of literary translator Anthea Bell (who died in 2018) and the uncle of Oliver Kamm, now a Times leader writer who served as his political adviser during his term as a Member of Parliament (MP).
He was privately educated at the Taverham Hall School just outside Norwich in Norfolk, and then The Leys School in Cambridge. At King's College, Cambridge, he achieved a first-class honours degree in English and served on the committee of Cambridge University Liberal Club, including a term as publicity officer. He failed to obtain a commission during his two-year national service and served out his time as an acting corporal in the Suffolk Regiment, serving in Cyprus during the Emergency.
Martin Bell joined the BBC as a reporter in Norwich in 1962. He moved to London three years later, beginning a distinguished career as a foreign affairs correspondent with his first assignment in Ghana. Over the next thirty years, he covered eleven conflicts and reported from eighty countries, making his name with reports from wars and conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, Nigeria, Angola, and in Northern Ireland (during "The Troubles").
His roles at the BBC included diplomatic correspondent (1977–78), chief Washington correspondent (1978–89), and Berlin correspondent (1989–94).
He won the Royal Television Society's Reporter of the Year award in 1977 and 1993 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1992. That same year, while covering the war in Bosnia, Bell was seriously wounded by shrapnel while recording a report in Sarajevo.
He remained an official BBC correspondent, although from the mid-1990s he filed relatively few reports, and became disillusioned with the corporation. He was unimpressed by the BBC's introduction of a 24-hour news channel (BBC News 24) and what he described as the increasing "Murdochisation" of BBC News.
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Martin Bell
Martin Bell, OBE (born 31 August 1938) is a British UNICEF (UNICEF UK) Ambassador, a former broadcast war reporter and former independent politician who became the Member of Parliament (MP) for Tatton from 1997 to 2001. He is sometimes known as "the man in the white suit".
As a BBC reporter, he pioneered an approach to journalism he later described as a "moral enterprise" informed by the individual journalist’s personal sense of “right and wrong", and which, as he put it, "cares as well as knows; that is aware of its responsibilities; and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor."
Bell is the son of author-farmer Adrian Bell, compiler of the first ever Times crossword. He is the brother of literary translator Anthea Bell (who died in 2018) and the uncle of Oliver Kamm, now a Times leader writer who served as his political adviser during his term as a Member of Parliament (MP).
He was privately educated at the Taverham Hall School just outside Norwich in Norfolk, and then The Leys School in Cambridge. At King's College, Cambridge, he achieved a first-class honours degree in English and served on the committee of Cambridge University Liberal Club, including a term as publicity officer. He failed to obtain a commission during his two-year national service and served out his time as an acting corporal in the Suffolk Regiment, serving in Cyprus during the Emergency.
Martin Bell joined the BBC as a reporter in Norwich in 1962. He moved to London three years later, beginning a distinguished career as a foreign affairs correspondent with his first assignment in Ghana. Over the next thirty years, he covered eleven conflicts and reported from eighty countries, making his name with reports from wars and conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, Nigeria, Angola, and in Northern Ireland (during "The Troubles").
His roles at the BBC included diplomatic correspondent (1977–78), chief Washington correspondent (1978–89), and Berlin correspondent (1989–94).
He won the Royal Television Society's Reporter of the Year award in 1977 and 1993 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1992. That same year, while covering the war in Bosnia, Bell was seriously wounded by shrapnel while recording a report in Sarajevo.
He remained an official BBC correspondent, although from the mid-1990s he filed relatively few reports, and became disillusioned with the corporation. He was unimpressed by the BBC's introduction of a 24-hour news channel (BBC News 24) and what he described as the increasing "Murdochisation" of BBC News.