Chris Shaw’s Exit Interview: ITN Editorial Director On Harry & Meghan’s Press Relations, Ice Sculptures & The “Laissez-Faire” Regulation Of GB News
05.04.2023 - 07:45
/ deadline.com
EXCLUSIVE: Chris Shaw has left the building. The Oscar-nominated British news executive is calling it quits after an on-off love affair with news producer ITN that has spanned 40 years, affording him a front-row seat to the biggest stories of his generation. Semi-retirement beckons, but not before a valedictory interview.
So is this Shaw unleashed? Has he, as Andrew Marr memorably put it when he left the BBC, found his voice after being constrained by ITN’s duty to impartiality? Not quite. It will take more than a jolly phone interview to break the habit of a career. But there is little doubt that he is looser-lipped on his final day at the office — and that’s good news because few are better placed than Shaw to reflect on the state of news in the UK.
His decorated résumé includes helping Rupert Murdoch launch Sky News in 1989 and, nearly a decade later, performing a similar trick for Channel 5, now owned by Paramount. He has clutched BAFTA and Emmy gongs for films including PBS Frontline’s Children of Syria, while the documentary short Watani: My Homeland earned him an Oscar nomination. Shaw also boasts a couple of big royal scoops: Harry & Meghan: An African Journey opened the floodgates to the Sussex saga and The Queen’s Green Planet can lay claim to one of Queen Elizabeth II’s only major interviews.
We start with the final five years of his career, which have given him a unique vantage over the tumultuous fallout from Brexit, war in Ukraine, and a global pandemic. During this time he has served as ITN’s Editorial Director, standing atop a “Himalayan range” casting an eye over its news supply to the UK’s three biggest commercial public broadcasters: ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5.
Shaw has felt the ground shifting
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