Kathryn AdieCBEDL (born 19 September 1945)[2] is an English
journalist. She was Chief News Correspondent for
BBC News between 1989 and 2003, during which time she reported from war zones around the world.
Adie was born in
Whitley Bay,
Northumberland.[3] She was adopted as a baby by a
Sunderland pharmacist and his wife, John and Maud Adie,[4] and grew up there. Her birth parents were Irish Catholics and she made contact with her birth family in 1993, establishing a loving relationship lasting more than 20 years with her birth mother 'Babe' Dunnet. She failed to trace her birth father John Kelly, or his family from
Waterford, despite public appeals, she knows only that he had a brother (her blood uncle) Michael.[5]
During her third year at Newcastle, she also taught English in sub-arctic northern Sweden.[9]
Career
Radio
Her career with the BBC began, after graduation, as a station assistant at
BBC Radio Durham. From 1971 to 1975 she was at
Radio Bristol, where she presented 'Womanwise' on Fridays at 11am.[10]
Television
By 1977, she was a
BBC South news reporter based in Plymouth and Southampton,[11][12] before her move to BBC national television news in 1979. She was the duty reporter one evening in May 1980 and first on the scene when the
Special Air Service (SAS) went in to break up the
Iranian Embassy siege. As smoke bombs exploded in the background and SAS soldiers abseiled in to rescue the hostages, Adie reported live and unscripted to one of the largest news audiences ever while crouched behind a car door.[13] This proved to be her big break.[14] Adie reported extensively for BBC News, including from the north London crime scenes of serial killer
Dennis Nilsen, in 1983.[15]
Adie was thereafter regularly dispatched to report on disasters and conflicts throughout the 1980s, including
The Troubles in Northern Ireland,[16] the American bombing of
Tripoli in 1986 (her reporting of which was criticised by the
Conservative Party Chairman
Norman Tebbit),[17][18][19] and the
Lockerbie bombing of 1988.[20][21] She was promoted to Chief News Correspondent in 1989 and held the role for fourteen years.[22]
One of her most significant assignments was to report the
Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. She was reportedly injured after being grazed by a bullet which had "shaved the skin off her arm", as she ran through Tiananmen Square at the height of the protests.[23][24] Nearly thirty years later, she said that she and her team were the only crew out in the square, and so were able to witness "the massacre by the Chinese army of its own citizens in Beijing in 1989", which had never been acknowledged by the government nor reported in China. She said, "... at least we were there and we have the evidence of what they did. They would love to erase it from history".[25][26] Adie famously had a public disagreement with fellow British journalist
John Simpson, who reportedly had accused her of falsifying her reports on Tiananmen Square.[27]
In
Libya she met leader Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi. She was also shot by a drunk and irate
Libyan army commander after refusing, as a journalist, to act as an intermediary between the British and Libyan governments; the bullet, fired at point-blank range, nicked her
collar bone but she did not suffer permanent harm.[28]
A newspaper cartoon features two soldiers, one with a tattered flag "To Iraq" on the barrel of his machine gun, and the caption "We can't start yet... Kate Adie isn't here."[30] Her insistence upon being on the spot elicited the wry
adage that "a good decision is getting on a plane at an airport where Kate Adie is getting off".[31][32]
In 2003 Adie retired from the BBC, where she had been Chief News Correspondent.[33] She subsequently worked as a
freelancejournalist, where among other work she gives regular reports on
Radio New Zealand, as a public speaker, as well as participating in many of the 500 iPlayer episodes[34] of From Our Own Correspondent on
BBC Radio 4. She hosted two five-part series of Found, a Leopard Films production for BBC One, in 2005 and 2006. The series considered the life experiences of adults affected by
adoption and what it must be like to start one's life as a
foundling.[35]
In 2017 she was one of the speakers at the
Gibraltar International Literary Festival.[36]
We seem to be living through a time where there are threats to journalists everywhere, whether it's repression or censorship, and it's hugely important to recognise that the intention of journalism is to tell it as it is and we need to do that more than ever now.
Adie was appointed Chancellor of
Bournemouth University on 7 January 2019, succeeding
Baron Phillips of Worth Matravers.[38] In her address, she warned postgraduate journalism students that confirming information and verifying news sources was critical in the current climate of fake news. She stressed the importance of personally verifying news sources. "Getting your person there is an absolutely standard lesson... news is not news without verification. ...If you only have the station cat to send, send them!".[39]
The satirical British puppet TV show Spitting Image depicted Adie as a thrill seeker giving her the title "BBC Head of Bravery" and featuring her puppet in dangerous situations.[citation needed]
^"Laureation address – Kathryn Adie". Laureation by Professor John Anderson, School of International Relations. University of St Andrews. 22 June 2010. Retrieved 5 August 2020.;
"Media horoscope: Kate Adie". The Guardian. 29 October 2001. Retrieved 5 August 2020.
^Higgins, Michael; Smith, Angela (26 August 2010). "Not One of U.S.: Kate Adie's report of the 1986 US bombing of Tripoli and its critical aftermath". Journal of Journalism Studies. 12 (3). Taylor & Francis Online: 344–358.
doi:
10.1080/1461670X.2010.504568.
S2CID142827159.
^
ab"Kate Adie OBE". Women in the Humanities. Retrieved 11 March 2020.