Being a key personality who regularly appears on BBC News, and having worked at the BBC most of her working life, Zeinab Badawi naturally took the side of the BBC when she addressed an audience in Malta on Monday.

Badawi was born in Sudan and has lived in Britain since the age of three. Her great-grandfather, Sheikh Babiker Badri, fought against Kitchener's British forces at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 and pioneered women's education in Sudan. Badawi's father was a newspaper editor in Sudan committed to social reform who, when the family moved to the UK, joined the BBC's Arabic Service.

She was the first presenter of the ITV Morning News (now known as ITV News at 5:30), and co-presented Channel 4 News with Jon Snow (1989–1998), before joining BBC News. Badawi is currently the presenter of World News Today broadcast on both BBC Four and BBC World News, and Reporters (BBC News programme), a weekly showcase of reports from the BBC.

 The Malta event was co-organised by Leading Talks and the Tumas Fenech Foundation, represented by former President Ugo Mifsud Bonnici while former Speaker Michael Frendo chaired the meeting.

Her talk was not exactly about the BBC but that is what in the end it became. Although she admitted that the number of foreign correspondents the BBC used to have has been cut down, notwithstanding the 250 million people who have access to the BBC news service, and it has consequently had to rely more and more on local correspondents, she highlighted the well-known methodology that seeks to get at least two sources for any news that is carried. And even that, she said, sometimes carries risks as when two ‘independent’ sources turned out to be related.

But not all her audience agreed that the BBC coverage was the world’s best. Stanley Parker, a historian, quoted his brother in New Zealand as claiming the BBC is perceived as full of bias in New Zealand.

European Parliament hopeful Roberta Metsola said any time she turns on the BBC there is Nigel Farage. Ms Badawi did not attempt to duck that: she actually admitted the BBC is perceived as being ‘left of centre’ and said that UKIP is news and many people have come to identify with it.

Some attempted to bring her to comment on issues on the national scene, such as the Dingli cliffs suicide case. She agreed that such cases need to be treated sensitively with due respect for the people and families involved, as happened in the Malaysian plane case. Journalists should be careful not to become, as Margaret Thatcher had once said, ‘oxygen for terrorists’. In the case of visual news, care must be taken to curb the showing of images that upset people, such as showing gory images of victims of bombings or of massacres as in Central Africa.

Television stations show much more-self restraint than is normally thought.

With hunting being another contentious issue, and with a BBC producer being in the news that same day after being questioned for hours by the police and making an immediate exit to London where he continued to heap abuse at Malta in general, Ms Badawi merely said that the anti-fox hunting lobby should not expect its views to go mainstream not just in the UK but also in the other countries where people watch the BBC.