David Blair (journalist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are very few or no other articles that link to this one.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. After links have been created, remove this message.
This article has been tagged since September 2006.

David Blair is the Diplomatic Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph. Born in Malawi on 14 April 1973, he was educated at Oxford University, where he read politics, philosophy and economics, and Cambridge University, where he studied international relations.

He began working for the Daily Telegraph in Zimbabwe in 1999. He was forced to leave the country by President Robert Mugabe's regime in June 2001. Blair later published a book about his experiences called "Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe". He was named Young Journalist of the Year by the Foreign Press Association for his coverage of Zimbabwe.

Thereafter, he was based in Pakistan (2002 - 2003) and the Middle East (2003 - 2004). He was among the first journalists to enter Jenin Refugee Camp in the West Bank after the bitterly controversial Israeli assault in April 2002. Blair's front page report on the Palestinian suffering caused by this attack, headlined "Blasted to Rubble by the Israelis",^[1] attracted considerable attention as the Daily Telegraph had always been perceived as favourable to Israel.

Blair reported extensively from Iraq before and after the American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. At the height of the looting in Baghdad in April 2003, Blair entered Saddam Hussein's old foreign ministry and found documents purporting to show that George Galloway, the British MP, had received money from the deposed regime. Galloway vigorously denied this charge and sued the Daily Telegraph for libel. Galloway won the case in November 2004 and the newspaper paid him damages of £150,000. The Daily Telegraph did not attempt to claim justification (a defence in which the defendant bears the onus of proving that the defamatory reports are true): "It has never been the Telegraph's case to suggest that the allegations contained in these documents are true".^[2] Instead, the paper sought to argue that it acted responsibly because the allegations it reported were of sufficient public interest to outweigh the damage caused to Galloway's reputation.

Blair became the Daily Telegraph's Africa Bureau Chief in June 2004. He reported on the war in Darfur, the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the war in Northern Uganda. He left this job some time in late 2006.

Although born in Africa, Blair is a British citizen. He is not related to the British prime minister, Tony Blair.^[3]