A former BBC reporter is claiming that the U.K. broadcaster “buried” footage that he captured of Banksy at one of his mural sites in New York City.
Nick Bryant, who previously served as the BBC’s New York correspondent, detailed his encounter with the anonymous British street artist and political activist in a recent post on his Substack.
After establishing a relationship with Banksy’s team while covering the artist’s residency in NYC in 2013 for the broadcaster, Bryant said he “kept in touch with his PR team.”
A few years had passed when “one morning in March 2018, I was awoken by a phone call from Britain. Banksy’s PR team wanted to give me a heads-up. That day, he would unveil a fresh artwork somewhere in New York,” Bryant wrote.
The reporter later learned that the location of Banksy’s new artwork would be at Lower Manhattan’s The Houston Bowery Wall, a well-established outdoor mural space known for showcasing international street art by renowned artists.
“Our bureau in Lower Manhattan was not far away. We got there quickly, beating everyone to the punch,” Bryant wrote. However, the reporter said he was surprised to see that the mural featured an image of Kurdish artist Zehra Dogan, who was imprisoned by the Turkish authorities, as he was anticipating Banksy to deliver his take on President Donald Trump, amid his first term in the White House.
Before informing his BBC colleagues in London, Bryant said, “We noticed a security guard wearing a fluorescent yellow jacket patrolling the sidewalk” near the site. After striking up a conversation with him, the security guard said the artist “told him crowds would soon descend. The media, too.”
That’s when Bryant asked him what Banksy looked like. “Without missing a beat, he pointed to a cafe over the road, where a middle-aged man wearing a black beanie and a dishevelled grey coat was just leaving with a piping hot takeaway coffee. That, he said, was the artist. His young female assistant was walking, jauntily, alongside,” Bryant wrote.
The reporter and his cameraman then took off running after the artist and his assistant, but they quickly jumped in a car and “floored it,” he wrote, adding, “We filmed him speeding down Houston Street.”
Bryant said he called his bosses in Washington and London to inform them of the “world exclusive” they had just captured. “We had caught Banksy in the act. The man we had filmed even had fresh paint on his fingers,” he wrote.
However, the reporter noted that he was met with an “institutional and personal dilemma,” as he “did not want to be the journalist who revealed his identity. It would compromise his future work and blunt his political edge.” But on the other hand, “Journalists are not in the suppression business.”
As Bryant was weighing both perspectives, he said that “a phone call came through from London.”
“A senior colleague told me that his daughter had accompanied him to work that day, and thought it was wrong to unveil Banksy,” he wrote. “We should not be the news organization, she reckoned, to tell kids there was no Father Christmas.”
He continued, “The BBC’s then arts editor entered the fray, explaining that whenever he asked audiences if they wanted to find out Banksy’s true identity, they all cried out no. In a culture fixated by fame, namelessness evidently held an even higher currency. The BBC’s then head of news agreed.”
In the end, Bryant said the U.K. broadcaster “buried the footage” of the famed artist. The Hollywood Reporter reached out to the BBC for comment.
For years, people and media outlets have been trying to unmask Banksy. Earlier this year, Reuters claimed it unveiled the artist’s real identity, saying that the person behind the art is Robin Gunningham, who allegedly changed his name to David Jones some years ago.
