British journalist Chris Bishop has stepped down after three years at the helm of award-winning South African news programme News at Seven.
He has resigned as senior executive producer with SABC to launch his own media and training company, Information Nation. He and partner Neil Ferguson fly to Khartoum this month for a contract to train journalists for Sudan’s national TV.
Bishop has been in Africa for 11 years. He freelanced in Zimbabwe for five years for The Daily Telegraph and the BBC and covered events in Angola, Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia from a base in Harare.
In 2000, he launched Botswana’s independent TV service, but quit his post as head of news and current affairs a year later as a protest about Government interference in news coverage.
He was ordered at the last minute to pull a documentary about South African Mariette Bosch, who was hanged for murder but had made allegations of police harassment and intimidation.
Bishop began his career on weeklies in the West Midlands and worked for the Evening Despatch in Darlington and the Western Evening Herald in Plymouth before moving to New Zealand.
He began his television career with TVNZ; on his return to Britain he worked for BBC’s Breakfast News and was Newsroom South East’s reporter in Oxford before leaving for Africa.
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