Mark Laity

Mark Latey is a former BBC Defense Analyst/Specialist and later became NATO spokesman.

Andrew Gilligan describes his former colleague:

The BBC is a funny organization; it is of course a state broadcaster, and... it has got some fantastic journalists – some very good journalists – it also has a minority of distinctly average journalists who see their job as simply going to press conferences and reporting what is said at such press conferences or other such forums, and who deeply dislike original stories or muck racking journalism. They genuinely feel that it is not the BBC's remit. I remember a guy called Mark Latey who was a defense correspondent when I arrived in 1999, and of course he was deeply unhappy at the fact that the Today [Program] had taken on someone like me because I was a defense expert as well, and he wouldn't get those all important two-ways on Today anymore. He was very unhappy at that, but he was also unhappy about my approaches to journalism. I wrote a story early on Today where I used the phrase "the BBC has learned...", and he rang me up and said, "the BBC does not learn..." And later on, in the end, he went off to become a PR person for NATO. He turned up in Macedonia where I was doing a story, and very quickly he became known as the "mission creep". And he always thought that I had coined that nickname for him – I didn't actually. So, there are people like that...