1980s - world conflict
This was a decade of major international conflict and the BBC found itself torn between covering conflict in several locations.
Conflicts in the Falkland Islands, Northern Ireland, Tiananmen Square, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, stretched resources immensely. In Africa reporter Michael Buerk alerted the world through BBC News to a famine of biblical proportions in Ethiopia, leading to Bob Geldof’s international Live Aid phenomenon in 1985 masterminded by the BBC.