Blinded by Media | Nikolai Gorshkov | TEDxCityUniversityLondon

At TEDxCityUniversityLondon 2015 Nikolai has narrated his story of involvement in the media industry. In his speech he presents arguments how the media has developed in the modern age to 'blind' the public in favour of particular interests.

Nikolai Gorshkov was born in Russia and lived in England and Japan. On his many and varied assignments he drank cognac with Robert Maxwell in a Kremlin-provided limo, flew in PM Thatcher’s jet to the earthquake stricken Armenia, showed Peter Ustinov around KGB and shared Soviet anecdotes with John Le Carre for his ‘Russia House’ best-seller. It all came to a halt with the failed 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev that Nikolai predicted as early as December 1990. He broke through the glass wall between vernacular services and Newsgathering in 2001 to become a BBC News correspondent in Moscow, where he reported on hostage crises, the bewildering Yukos saga, and the shocking self-destruction of the pro-Western opposition to President Putin in the 2003-2004 elections. From 2004 to 2013 Nikolai ran media monitoring operations for the BBC across Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Balkans. His analysis of the public mood in Crimea completed in 2009 proved to be correct in March last year.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx