Kate Adie OBE
Kate Adie is considered to be among the very finest television reporters. As the BBC’s Chief News Correspondent she covered conflicts and major events, and is recognised for her accurate and trustworthy accounts, often delivered from danger zones around the world.
Her big break was the London Iranian Embassy siege in 1980. At that time it represented a breakthrough for women journalists as until that time war zones and other hotspots were the preserve of male journalists. As that afternoon’s duty reporter, Adie was first on the scene as the SAS stormed the embassy. The BBC interrupted coverage of the World Snooker Championships and Adie reported live and unscripted to one of the largest news audiences ever whilst crouched behind a car door.
Kate Adie was regularly dispatched to report on disasters and flare-ups throughout the 1980s, including the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986, which proved highly controversial with the Conservative Party Chairman Norman Tebbit, and the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. She was promoted to Chief News Correspondent in 1989 and held the role for fourteen years. One of her first assignments was to report from the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
Major assignments followed in the Gulf War, war in the former Yugoslavia, the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and the British evacuation of foreign nationals from Sierra Leone in 2000. In 2003 she withdrew from front-line reporting. Kate Adie currently works as a freelance journalist and public speaker.
She has honorary degrees from six universities, is an Honorary Professor of Journalism at University of Sunderland, and has an Honorary Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London. She presents the BBC’s long running Radio Four programme, ‘From Our Own Correspondent’.
As a hugely popular after-dinner and conference speaker, Kate Adie moves beyond the anecdotal to reveal insights and observations of the fascinating, multi-faceted world of Kate Adie.
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