Tom Silverstone News Today

Exploring what America's most overlooked peoples and places reveal about a nation divided.

The orange jumpsuits, the shaved heads, the waterboarding – the images conjured by the mere mention of the words “Guantánamo Bay detention centre” are the stuff of nightmares – scenarios that wouldn’t feel out of a place in a Horror movie. Entering Laurence Topham’s documentary short My Brother’s Keeper knowing little more than it was the story of an ex-Guantánamo detainee, I braced myself for a harrowing viewing experience. Little did I know I was about to watch one of ...

Last modified on Wed 20 Jan 2021 22.18 EST Oliver Laughland, US southern bureau chief: It was somewhere along the 700-mile night-time drive from Tampa, Florida, to my home in New Orleans that I realized filming the Anywhere But Washington series was becoming one of the hardest assignments in my career. Hours earlier, my colleague Tom Silverstone and I had interviewed a conservative radio host spreading baseless conspiracy theories about Covid-19 to a crowd of at-risk, Donald Trump-supporting se...

Covid through a lens: how we made documentaries amid the pandemic Charlie Phillips Every team in the Guardian probably thinks they’ve been affected the most by the Covid pandemic, but those of us in the video department believe we are the the ones who have had to dramatically change how we do our journalism the most. You can’t make a good video down a phone line, it’s preferable by far to have two staff on a shoot, and you need to get close to people to provoke empathy in ...