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I would like to convey my admiration & good wishes to Charlotte Esler. I found her broadcast to be very mature & professional for a 14yr old & it must have given hope to others suffering from cancer and in particular Hodgkin's Disease.

There are comments on the Newsnight website that the report had no place on a serious news programme & smacked of insider 大象传媒 coverage-this misses the point completely! It is precisely because Gavin Esler is such an excellent journalist & works for the 大象传媒 that Charlotte's report was able to reach so many people.

Gavin has a daughter to be proud of & I hope that her remission will continue. Perhaps she will become a journalist to rival her father in the future!

Dear Gavin

It really took us by surprise to see that your lovely daughter has been through such a hard time. What a wonderful person she is and a great credit to you and your wife.

Seeing you report around the world one would never know the heart ache you must have been through. God bless you as a family and good luck for the future.

Kind regards,
Maureen and family.

Although i do not have anyone in the family going through the anguish you and your family have been through. I do wish Charlotte and the rest of your family my best wishes.

Also We must remember that there are children around the world who have been abducted and have yet be reunited with their familes. in the cause of Ben (cannot remember surname) who has been missing for several years after being abducted in spain while on holiday.

I wish Maddy and all those children who have been abducted a safe return.

The Iraq item was excellent but very distressing when interviewing the woman whose husband was killed in a sectarian attack. The son in the background was upset by his mother's anguish. Is there something we can do for this lady? There are many people in need but if there is some way of alleviating one families distress it would make me feel better. Your advice would be appreciated.

'Decide what the story is, and defend it with your life, whether it's true or not!' - the first rule of journalism, and the principle behind your fatuous, plagiarised, Order of the Brown Nose. What's the story? Cameron is the man of the future, his elevation to PM merely awaiting the formality of an election when he will be acclaimed by a grateful nation; while Brown, on the other hand, is a political and personal disaster area, unpersonable, unelectable, or worse. Only the problem is, Gordon has made rather a good start, and even the polls seem to like him. Quick - we're losing the story - something must be done! Bring on the OBN - setting the scene for us to mock anyone who feels like saying anything nice about the man - not only a particularly stupid trivialisation of a somewhat important issue (a task which the gormless Steve Smith is always up for, of course) but a means of ruling out any positive coverage of Brown in the weeks ahead. What a wheeze! Doubles all round! (see Private Eye, passim.)

The Iraq piece yesterday was brilliant. The insight into the lives of ordinary Iraqis was missing in Mark Urban's piece on Monday. What is the name of the filmmaker? It's interesting that the Newsnight presenter kept on repeating the name of the 大象传媒 reporter when the filmmaker who sounded middle eastern was rarely mentioned. I hope more fimmakers have the balls to do programs like this.
Ahmed Ali Abbas

The Sadr City report was an extraordinary piece of journalism. I've followed the work of Maziar Bahari on Newsnight and Channel4 News and everytime his name is attached to a programme about Iraq or Iran it simply means quality. Tim Hewell's reporting was superb as well. But Mr. Bahari seems to have a way to communicate with people that other reporters cannot. I just watched the film on the internet agai and I still can't hold my tears back when a little boy cries behind his mother or when the orphan girls repeats the words mother and father in the classroom. First rate tv documentary from the best team in television. Congratulations!

Through Mark Urban's article , we could see that there are so many piteios children not only in Irag , but everywhere . Our missions are to provide more school ,hospital ,orphanage ....for them not atomic-bomb plant , new missile defence systems ...
We should look forward more on compassionate thing than on annihilatory thing.

First may i congratulate Newsnight on such a clever, witty and informative programme. I hope they will agree with me that this is public service television at its best? A programme that is not only a giant that stands like a colossus in Knossos but also a delight in the night that gives immense pleasure for very little treasure. How Smithy breezes teases with a nose for the prose down to the rings on his toes.

How nice to see music makers Bono and Geldoff who repeatedly try to hotwire the political process and go for a joyride. A word in the shell-like. You say you were taken for a ride, took people at their word, that there is a crisis of credibility and that western people are only worried about africa because of the risk to their beach properties? Madonna adopts african babies. Others adopt utopian ideas about africa. Which is better?

The Sadr City piece was superb - I don't think I have ever seen such a moving piece of TV. Congratulations Newsnight for showing us in fine grain detail the plight of people in Iraq.

The Sadr City piece was the most amazing programme I've ever seen on Iraq. It was so human and informative at the same time. Shouldn't the American and British governmensts help rebuilding the hospitals in Iraq instead of shooting at them? I congratulate Newsnight for its courage in producing and showing this film.

Tremendously moving to watch that lovely girl, your daughter Charlotte, give us such a moving insight into what she has been experiencing. Our prayers and thoughts are with her and the whole family for a full recovery and long and happy, healthy life.

I'm not at all sure that I like the effect of having the voice-over translation acting the emotions of the interviewee, in Sadr City. Weren't the bereaved woman's feelings and pain clear enough? It felt like manipulation to me.

Since the crew followed her to the mullah's relief centre, could we not have been told whether this woman, who was so in anguish at having nothing with which to support herself and her sons (on top of losing her husband, and living in fear), received any aid, and if she would in the future?

The insane beliefs of the Iraqi (woman doctor) parliamentarian thoroughly undermined what little hope I had for the Iraqi democratic process, as presently constituted. The anti-semitism didn't help, although it matched the way of thinking reported last week as having been preponderant in the muslim bookstore in Leeds run by one of the London Transport bombers. It jarred with me that the interviewer asked her husband about him not following the normal male role in body-guarding her, acting as her secretary and looking after the children, when muslim men are not usually totally aside from caring for their families, and his wife's political work was pretty much promoting the teachings of their mullah - a male-dominated agenda.

Couldn't there have been more precise information on how Sadr City now compares to how it was pre-invasion? What damage has been done, and what repairs and improvements made? The implications were that huge damage was done and little repair has happened, but that felt like biased information. If the piece was about Sadr City, could something that was also more factual not have been made?

As a piece about the plight of Iraqi people one could find no fault though.

Both Mark Urban's and the Sadr City report were brave, thoughtful and illuminating. For some time I have wanted to hear more from the people and leaders on all sides of the issue - and that means the terrorists / insurgents and their leaders too. In fact, have you interviewed Moqtada al Sadr yet? Seems to me that if all sides of an issue are not penetrated equaly then the sum of your output suffers from bias.

Does the Beeb provide any measure of the degree to which its coverage fully (in a balanced way) represents all sides of the key stories? John's Bolton interview (on Today 17 May) would have been another instance where some measure of the 大象传媒's record of balance (or of bias) would have been useful.

I don't want to let the Beeb off the hook but perhaps there is scope for an independent agency to measure balance and bias within organisations? Is there one?