Tim Sebastian
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tim Sebastian (born 13 March 1952, London, England) is a television journalist. He was the presenter of BBC's HARDtalk. He won the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Richard Dimbleby award in 1982 and Britain's prestigious Royal Television Society Interviewer of the Year award in 2001 for the second time in a row.
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[edit] Education
Sebastian was educated in Leeds in Yorkshire, in Northern England and at Westminster School, a fee-paying Independent school in Central London. He holds a BA Honours degree in Modern Languages from Oxford University, and speaks both German and Russian.
[edit] Journalist
Sebastian's career as a journalist began at Reuters in 1974. He started as the BBC's foreign correspondent at Warsaw in 1979. He became BBC's Europe correspondent in 1982, for Moscow in 1985 (he was expelled from the USSR) and then for Washington from 1986 to 1989. He has also written eight novels and two non-fiction books.
[edit] Interviewer
Sebastian specializes in setting traps for his interviewees. He presents his cases, after a careful study of them and tries to expose them with his grilling questions. His style of conducting an interview is controversial, including insisting on simple answers to complicated questions and of calling people to account for not having gotten enough done in what has been, realistically, an impossibly short time frame to do so. He has travelled widely to interview presidents, prime ministers and kings, as well as authors, actors and musicians for the BBC's HARDtalk series of programs.
In his August 2001 interview of apartheid era South African superspy, Craig Williamson, Sebastian was told that the bombings, assassinations and other actions for which Williamson was responsible, were all carried out "in support of the West". The NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, Williamson boasted, killed far more civilians than his dirty tricks brigade ever did.[1]
Currently, Sebastian is the Chairman of "The Doha Debates", shown on the BBC.
