Rules of engagement

The BBC foreign correspondent Hugh Sykes was meant to be talking about how music has shaped his life with Sarah Walker on Essential Classics last week (Radio 3, Friday), but their conversation actually gave us far more crucial insights into why he has won awards for his work, reporting from troubled places such as Tehran, Baghdad, Belfast, Berlin and Islamabad. He stressed the importance of checking your facts, ‘Verify, verify, verify’, and especially now that the demand for instant news coincides and conflicts with the torrents of information flooding the internet. ‘Never report anything until you’ve got at least two sources,’ Sykes insisted. He also explained how easy he found it to get people talking. ‘I’m holding a microphone. I ask a question. They answer. And they go on talking, and I don’t have to do very much.’

Here, I suspect he was being modest. ‘You have to be engaging. You have to be friendly. You have to trust people. Above all, you must never be afraid of them,’ he said, adding, ‘If you’re afraid of someone without very good reason, it’s an insult.’ This was not an obvious observation, and far more meaningful because of it.

What makes Sykes stand out as a radio reporter is his acute eye and his empathic understanding of what details are needed to tell a story, never overloading his reports with adjectives or emotion but finding just the right image to make what he is saying stick in the mind. In Iraq, for instance, from where he has been reporting since the 2003 invasion by British and US troops, and which he loves as a place and as a people, he was on his way to a polling station to witness the first democratic election since the fall of Saddam Hussein.