Media Futures: How Channel 4 News got nominated for an Oscar

Meet Ben de Pear, the programme’s editor before a special screening of the multiple award winning film ‘For Sama’.

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The documentary charting a mother’s experience of the war in Syria has won over 70 industry awards including an Oscar nomination.

Join Ben de Pear to discuss the documentary before a screening of ‘For Sama’.

Ben will also be talking about how the news team has been covering the pandemic, which he says ‘has rewritten the rules of what we do and how we do it’.

For Sama

For Sama is an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war. Told as a love letter from a young Syrian mother to her daughter, it tells the story of filmmaker Waad al-Kateab’s life through five years of the uprising in Aleppo, as she falls in love, gets married and gives birth to her daughter Sama, all while cataclysmic conflict rises around her. 

Biography   

Ben de Pear, 49, began his journalism career on the Staines and Ashford News as an intern. He joined Sky News in 1994 and went on to become foreign producer based in London 1996-2000. From 2000-2005 he was based in Johannesburg as Africa editor.       

In 2005 he joined Channel 4 News as foreign producer, became foreign editor in 2008 and was appointed editor in August 2012.      

This year Ben managed the programme’s coverage of the coronavirus crisis. Covid-19 has provided unprecedented disruption to the TV news industry and Ben has described how the virus ‘has rewritten the rules of what we do and how we do it’.   

He has also overseen the programme’s coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal, Election Expenses investigation, Inside Aleppo and the London and Paris massacres.  

He has won numerous Royal Television Society awards, including consecutive News Programme of the Year, multiple BAFTAs, International Emmy awards, Amnesty awards, FPA awards and online media awards.     

For two consecutive years, Channel 4 News won one of the world’s most prestigious journalism awards – a Peabody - for their undercover investigation into Cambridge Analytica and For Sama.  

Ben is the executive producer of the Oscar-nominated feature documentary For Sama - an intimate and epic journey into the female experience of war - which was released in theatres in the UK and broadcast on Channel 4 in 2019. For Sama has won over 70 industry awards.  

Ben is married with three children.  

• https://www.channel4.com/news/ 
• https://www.forsamafilm.com/ 
• Twitter: @bendepear