Mishal Husain is an award-winning British broadcaster and presenter, best known for her reporting at BBC News. In 2016, Husain was named by the “Sunday Times” as one of the 500 most influential people in Britain and one of the five most influential Muslim women in the UK. Before attending Cambridge University to read law, Husain gained her first experience in journalism at the age of 18 when she spent three months as a city reporter in Islamabad. In 2002, she became the BBC’s first Washington-based anchor, covering the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. Since then, she has reported from Cairo during the Egyptian Revolution; Pakistan after the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Benazir Bhutto; Peshawar after the deadly 2014 Taliban school attack, covered UK elections, the Brexit referendum, and Harry and Meghan’s first interview together, on their engagement in 2017. She is currently one of the anchor presenters of BBC Radio 4’s “The Today” program, the premier news broadcast in the UK, and presents news bulletins on BBC One.
Parts of this interview have been edited for clarity.
You gained your first experience in journalism at the age of 18 where you spent three months as a city reporter in Islamabad. What advice would you give your younger self now?
When I look back now, I thought of journalism as an independent exercise: get an assignment, go off, come back, write it up, and deliver it. Newsrooms can be quite a daunting place. It always feels like everyone knows each other if you’re a newcomer. Because of my lack of confidence, I didn’t take the time to try and get to know people. What I love about broadcasting is that you don’t have that option. You cannot put a radio or TV program on air without a team. There’s such a wonderful aspect of people with different skills working together.
Reflecting on your strong personal connection to Pakistan and starting your career as a young reporter. I wanted to ask about your coverage of the Peshawar school massacre in 2014 when the Taliban killed 132 children and 16 teachers. What was it like being the first journalist to enter the army school after such a violent event?
[The shooting] had happened in the morning, our time in the UK. My editor phoned me and said, could you get on a plane today? I said yes. It was coming up to Christmas and my children were relatively young at the time, but I thought that this was such an important story. I got on a plane and got to Islamabad early the next morning. It was just me and a producer. We drove three hours to Peshawar and went straight to the school.
Still relatively early in the morning, we stood outside the school with a cameraman from the BBC team in Islamabad. Many journalists were there but word came down to the soldiers at the gate that they could let me in, and the doors opened. Just two of us went in – myself and the cameraman.
It was such a terrible story that I have never, and will never, call it a scoop. I think that’s such a disrespectful term for the fact that I had this strange privilege, strange because I think I was just in the right place at the right time, to be one of the two people that they allowed in first. There was a path going up to the school, and a few soldiers were lining it. They’d spent the night clearing the bodies, but everything else was still there. The blood, broken glass, the shoes, glasses, books, everything that had just been dropped.
It was the strangest experience to walk through the site right through to this bombed-out auditorium where there had been a gunfight, and then through into the headmistress’s office, where ultimately, suicide bombers had blown themselves up. I thought we’re going to walk through, and I have one shot at recording what I see for both TV and radio. Our technical facilities were very limited, but we managed to film, come straight out, and go on air live.
To this day, I haven’t watched it back, partly because I will see so many things that I could have done better. But also because I still find it such a shocking thing. School is something we can all relate to, right? However old we are, it’s something so poignant. It was not long after the attack on Malala. These kinds of attacks go on today; they are just unspeakable and unimaginable. And yet, we have to speak about them. I saw the aftermath of one for myself. It was absolutely searing.
Which other conflict zones have made a deep impact on you?
I have been to Lebanon a couple of times where we broadcast from Syrian refugee camps. I have been to the Rohingya refugee camps in Eastern Bangladesh, and gosh that’s a forgotten crisis altogether. I feel really sad that the Rohingyas don’t get much attention. I remember looking around that refugee camp and having this very strong feeling that these young children would more than likely – unless there is a massive change in Myanmar – spend their whole lives in those tents. That’s a very hard thing to think about, I hope I’m wrong.
Those images stay with you but you are also [in conflict zones] to do a certain job. That gives you a purpose and keeps you very focused. Any time you are in those situations, you’ve got deadlines to meet, so everything you absorb is channeling you towards a certain end point which is to tell the story to your audience. At least for me — and I have not been exposed to some of the very extreme things that some of my colleagues have been exposed to — the mechanics of telling the story and getting on air has helped provide some kind of framework around the things you see.
As a Washington correspondent to the BBC, you covered the 9/11 attacks. A friend of yours remarked that they could not imagine anyone with a last name like yours being on American television doing the job that you do. What changes have you felt as a Muslim woman throughout your career?
I started my role as Washington correspondent for the BBC in September 2002, at a time of great tension: Afghanistan was underway, Iraq was coming. One of my earliest assignments was to cover the first anniversary of 9/11 at the Pentagon. My family is from Pakistan, a country that was immediately affected by those attacks.
I was in the very rare position then of being a Muslim fronting a news program in the States. Given my name, it’s an obvious aspect of my identity. It’s a very odd spotlight to be in, and I struggled with it at times. That aspect of my identity was noticeable in America in a way I had never experienced in the UK. I remember being in a department store, and a cashier spotted my name and asked me if I was related to Saddam Hussein. It was very odd. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry at a moment like that.
Thankfully, it’s different now. I see several anchors of Muslim heritage in high-profile positions.
Were there times in your career in the UK when being Muslim felt like a particularly prominent part of your identity?
Most of the time I don’t think about it, but certainly the London bombings in 2005, and during the worst period of ISIS in Iraq and Syria between 2014 to 2017. Of course, there are times when I can bring this part of my identity, the knowledge I have through it, into my work, not as a particular point of view, but as a point of information.
Can you describe a bit about what your job involves and what your week looks like now?
One of the first things to understand about broadcast journalism is that if you’re not prepared to work antisocial hours then this probably isn’t the job for you.
Radio 4’s Today program goes on air at 6 a.m., so I get up just after 3 a.m. and cycle to work. You have to be ready to hit the ground running on arrival. Within a quarter of an hour, about 4.15 am UK time, we are recording any guests on the East Coast who, because of the time difference, we’ve persuaded to stay up late.
One of the biggest challenges about these breakfast-time programs is that they’re 24-hour operations; you are constantly inheriting the work that’s been done by the team before you. It is then your job to carry that forward to its execution point when we go on air. You must be so clear in your communications, otherwise, crucial things get lost. There is a particular dynamic around this, things are always moving. For example, I could ring into the newsroom just before I go to sleep, to find out who I am interviewing the following morning. But in my experience, the parts are still moving. Even if they are set, you might spend half the night worrying about the next interview, only to wake up in the morning and realize your interviewee has changed. Get some sleep instead!
Working for the BBC, you have strict impartiality rules which you must follow. In which topics have you found it the most difficult to remain impartial?
There are parameters around every job. We are in the business of creating good conversation, and to do this you have to finely tune your antenna to ask: what do I need to know about this topic or person? It doesn’t mean that every single point of view is equally valid or should be treated equally, and it’s not always as simple as giving both sides. It’s about evaluating arguments all the time, and then reaching informed judgments on the validity of those arguments and the extent to which they should be a part of the conversation you’re curating. At its core, I feel the heart of any journalistic endeavor is to help us as a planet understand each other better. Our business should be about illuminating, not arguing, although the argument has its place.
Throughout your career, you’ve interviewed many high-profile figures, from Aung San Suu Kyi to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. What steps do you take to prepare and are you ever nervous?
With any high-profile interview and an interview of any length, you need to step back for a moment and think, what are the three most important things that I need to get out of this? Anything more than three and the interview becomes unwieldy.
The most important thing to do is listen, it sounds obvious, but it is so easy to just hear and not listen.
Sometimes, someone says something provoking and you have to make a choice – are you going to follow that, or is there something else that you really want to ask? You are constantly making split-second decisions.
What advice would you give to young women starting a career in journalism?
I feel fortunate that I did not experience some of the things that we are more likely to talk about now, like harassment or outright discrimination. I think the trickier thing for women in journalism now is not so much getting started but coping with the times when you may have to come in and out of the workplace through having children. It means points where you have to re-establish yourself.
Try and keep your options open, because hopefully, life is long, and careers are long. Don’t rule things out just because they seem impossible at a point of particular juggling. You want to keep as many paths open as possible.
Given the emotionally demanding nature of your job, what do you do to take care of your own well-being?
One of the most important things that aspiring journalists don’t realize is that to do your best work, you have to be disciplined in your personal life. You’re going to have to say no to things, you’re going to have to be careful not to burn out. Physical well-being and physical fitness are all part of making sure that your brain is working as well as it possibly can under pressure. There probably are people who could do my job burning the candle at both ends, but I’m not one of them.
Often, I come off air and regret asking certain things. Or not asking certain things! But those evaluations are part of being exacting with yourself. The minute you stop being exacting with yourself, the minute you stop being nervous, is the minute your performance starts declining.
Cover image: Husain at the recording studio (Jeff Overs/BBC)