Nik Gowing is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has specialized for two decades in reporting on diplomacy, defence, and international security. He is also a consultant on the role of the media in conflict management. In February 1996 he was appointed a main programme presenter/anchor for the BBC's international TV news service, BBC World. From 1989 to 1996 Gowing was diplomatic editor for the one-hour nightly news analysis programme Channel Four News from Independent Television News in London.
Since 1978 Gowing has reported on many international conflicts. He collected a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) award for his exclusive coverage of martial law in Poland in 1981. In 1989 he broke the news that Russian troops were secretly leaving Afghanistan. He received an award from the New York TV Festival for his military and diplomatic analysis of the Gulf War. During the 1980s as foreign affairs correspondent and then diplomatic correspondent, Gowing reported extensively from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In 1989 he reported on the revolutions marking the end of Communism, as well as the unrest in China. He remained an accredited correspondent in Moscow, where he reported on the assault on the White House in 1993. Since 1991 he has reported extensively on war in the former Yugoslavia with particular emphasis on diplomacy and the politico-military situation.
In 1994 Gowing was a resident fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His influential study of the media's role in war challenged conventional wisdom of an automatic cause- and-effect relationship between real-time television coverage of conflicts (the "CNN factor") and the making of foreign policy. Gowing is also a governor of the Westminster Foundation For Democracy and the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe.