Kate Adie Biography
Kate Adie (born Kathryn Adie) is an English journalist born on 19 September 1945 in Whitley Bay, Northumberland, England and grew up in Sunderland. She is popular for her work as BBC Chief News Correspondent. for reporting from war zones around the world. She is a presenter on BBC Radio 4 ‘From Our Own Correspondent’. Kate received a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2018.
She had an independent school education at Sunderland Church High School, and then studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where she obtained a degree in Scandinavian Studies and starred in several Gilbert and Sullivan productions.
Kate Adie Age
Kate Adie was born on 19 September 1945 in Whitley Bay, Northumberland, England (72 years as of 2017)
Kate Adie Height
Kate Adie stands at 5 feet 7 inches.
Kate Adie Parents
Her birth mother fell pregnant in a wartime affair when her doctor husband was away on service. Kate was adopted as a baby by a Sunderland pharmacist and his wife, John and Maud Adie, and grew up in Sunderland.
Kate Adie Husband
Kate has never been married, nor is there any mention of a husband or kids. Besides, Kate is ferociously protective of her family’s privacy and keeps every detail under the wraps.
Kate Adie
Kate Adie Net worth
Kate has never disclosed her net worth.
Kate Adie Career
Kate Adie began her career with BBC as a station assistant at BBC Radio Durham, then she became a producer for Radio Bristol. She then switched to television, directing outside broadcasts. She was a reporter for regional TV News in Plymouth and Southampton, and joined the national news team in 1976.
As a television news correspondent, Kate’s memorable assignments include both Gulf Wars, four years of war in the Balkans, the final NATO intervention in Kosovo and elections in 2000; the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster at Zeebrugge, the massacre at Dunblane, the Selby rail crash, the SAS lifting of the Iran Embassy Siege in London, the Bologna railway station bombing and the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing in 1989.
Kate carried out numerous assignments in Northern Ireland throughout “The Troubles” as well as reporting on the referendum to ratify the Good Friday Agreement. Kate covered the Lockerbie bombing and reported from Libya after the London Embassy siege of 1984, reporting from Libya many times thereafter, including the bombing of Tripoli by the US in 1986. She also covered the Rwandan Genocide and the British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War.
She has served as a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, now the Bailey’s, and the Whitbread, now the Costa Prize, and recently, the RSL Ondaatje Prize.
Kate has also served as a trustee of the Imperial War Museum and is a trustee of Sunderland Football Foundation.
In 2003 she resigned from BBC after being sidelined ahead of the expected conflict with Iraq. Her decision to step down as the BBC’s chief news correspondent ended a 34-year career.
The BBC insisted that she had not been forced out. The decision was “mutual” and she would continue to work for the BBC as a freelance presenter. However her departure comes after Adie found herself increasingly marginalised at the BBC – not least, some suspected, because of her outspoken criticisms of the corporation.
In particular she complained about the growing preoccupation with television journalists’ looks, saying her bosses were obsessed with “cute faces and cute bottoms and nothing else in between”.
Her comments gained credibility during the war in Afghanistan when Adie was given only a peripheral role. When the BBC unveiled plans for its coverage of the possible war in Iraq, Kate Adie was overlooked – which appears to have prompted her departure.
Kate Adie Awards and Honours
Kate has honorary degrees from universities including Newcastle, Bath, Nottingham, Cardiff and St Andrews and is Honorary Professor of Journalism at Sunderland University.
Kate was honoured with a Bafta Fellowship in 2018.
Other awards include:
- Royal Television Society Reporter of the Year 1980, for her coverage of the SAS end to the Iranian Embassy siege.
- Winner, 1981 & 1990, Monte Carlo International Golden Nymph Award.
- The Richard Dimbleby BAFTA Award 1990.
Kate Adie Iranian Embassy
Her break came the following year covering the SAS siege of the Iranian Embassy in London while crouched behind a car. Soon she was dispatched to conflicts across the globe making her name as a fearless reporter.
Kate Adie Books
- The Kindness of Strangers, Kate’s first book, is an account of her work as a reporter and how she became one. It was published by Headline in 2002 and remained on the Sunday Times best seller list for 37 weeks.
- Corsets to Camouflage is an illustrated companion history to the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition about women in uniform, published by Hodder & Stoughton to coincide with the exhibition’s opening in the autumn of 2003
- Nobody’s Child: The Lives of Abandoned Children, Hodder & Stoughton London 2005, formed the basis of the BBC 1 documentary series, Found
- Into Danger, Hodder & Stoughton 2008, is a study of men and women who risk their lives for work
- Fighting on the Home Front: the legacy of women in World War I, Hodder & Stoughton 2013, became a BBC 2 documentary broadcast as part of the Corporation’s WW1 Centenary Season
Kate Adie Interview
You’re one of the first significant women in news broadcasting. How was it at the time entering a ‘man’s’ world?
Kate Adie: Well that’s not entirely true. We were a minority, but there were quite a number of women in broadcasting.
Yes, but you were the one who stood out. What were the pressures you faced?
Kate Adie: When I came into the world of work [late 1960s], women weren’t expected to do a lot of jobs. There were still no high court judges who were women. There were no senior policewomen. There were no women in the armed services. There were a huge number of jobs in which women didn’t figure at all. I came into a world of work where you were expected to find barriers against you.
It was changing a little by the 1970s: the legal rights to equal pay and equal opportunities were brought in by law. I was part of that, although you never know while you’re there that a revolution is happening. You just assume it’s normal progress.
Kate Adie: And so I got a job as a radio producer on a local station. There weren’t many producers around. And then I transferred, eventually, to television news, and there were very few women working as reporters. But I wasn’t the only one and I wasn’t the first one. When it came to it, all working women knew there would be pressure anyway. You took it for granted that there would be hostile remarks; that people would be difficult. Frequently, when you turned up with a TV crew, somebody would ask: “Well, dear, where’s the reporter?” That was patronising. The assumption was that you were a personal assistant.
How did you cope with that?
Kate Adie: Very badly. You just said to them [firmly]: “I am the reporter.” You raised an eyebrow if they made a comment again.
Did being a woman stall any progress in your career?
Kate Adie: There was enormous difficulty, because it was a job people assumed was only done by a man. I was very lucky in television news. I had three senior news organisers who were young and very liberal minded. They used to say: “Right, hook off to Belfast.” They didn’t say: ‘Oh, you’re a woman; maybe we won’t send you.’ There was a lot of trouble in Belfast. You just do it.
But not all TV channels were like that. [Kate worked for the BBC.] I remember colleagues on other channels that were having terrible trouble, where they just got nothing. They just got the fluffy stuff. Back then, women would do the fluffy stuff. That was it, full stop. They didn’t think women could report on economics, crime, diplomacy and conflict.
London’s Iranian Embassy raid – how did getting that story feel?
Kate Adie: I didn’t get it at all. It was nearly the sixth day of the siege. I was one among approximately a dozen reporters rotating on a 24-hour rota. Nobody gave it to me. In fact, I was on duty by chance, because a very senior reporter, coming to the end of the day, asked me to take over a little earlier, which was what a junior [like Kate at the time] did. They rang up and said one of the news organisers wants to go to a dinner party, and asked if I could come in early. I did. I arrived at about 6.30pm, and just after 7.10pm the SAS raided the embassy.
What did it feel like breaking this story?
Kate Adie: You don’t think about how you feel. That is, completely, now a contemporary view of life. You don’t feel; you do. You have to get the pictures. You have to know what is happening. You have to watch it for yourself. You have to get ready to broadcast. You don’t start ‘feeling’.
Surely you must have feared for your life a little?
Kate Adie: You don’t have time to feel and have emotions. Let me tell you: when it does happen, what kick in are an enormous number of automatic responses. Your own brain and body tell you what to do. It’s complete fiction that people sit around and feel. Most people just do things – it’s actions.
What’s the most dangerous situation you’ve found yourself in?
Kate Adie: I don’t have one. I’ve been through so many. What’s more dangerous: someone holding a knife to your throat who’s drunk or someone holding a gun to your head who’s psychotic?
You once said you were timid as a child; why then become a war correspondent?
Kate Adie: I’m not a war correspondent! That’s the term used by other people. You never become a war correspondent as a job. It’s not advertised. You happen, sometimes, to go into situations of conflict, but other times you could be reporting on lots of things – diplomatic summits, flooding and so on… You never do it full time, for a very good reason. If you’re going to go into extremely terrible situations that are dangerous, difficult, distressing, you need to know what normal is. You need to be able to compare. Otherwise you can’t spend time in a difficult place like Sarajevo in the 1990s during the civil war. If you’re always reporting in areas of conflict, you begin to lose the edge of describing how unusual it is. You get used to it.
In Bosnia, you took shelter under a table when a particular conflict broke out, and two men from the family you were with went to the window and shot their postman. How did you react to that?
Kate Adie: I didn’t react to it. I literally lay straight under the table, because if someone is shooting they are going to get shot back at. I just thought: “I’ve got to get out of this place, because these people are starting a fight. We don’t want to be part of it.” We [Kate and her crew] had to get out of the building fast and safely and report the story – that’s why we were there. No one trains you how to react. You have to use your instincts. You have to find out some way of getting pictures and start finding out what’s going on. Sitting under a kitchen table is not the place to be.
You’re not trained like the armed forces, so how do you know how to react in volatile situations?
Kate Adie: You’re a journalist. Your job is to get the story back. You learn a lot on the job. In Northern Ireland, you learnt how to avoid a heaving mob of 500 people coming down the street throwing rocks: take cover. Don’t just stand there, looking a lemon. It’s all common sense and experience.
You’ve witnessed a lot of oppression; is it hard to remain unbiased?
Kate Adie: No. It’s your training. You’re a professional reporter. You’re not going there to take sides. You’re going there to say what happened. That’s what reporting is about.
So, it’s not difficult then?
Kate Adie: Look, there’s no such thing as a totally objective and unbiased human being, but you have professional standards. What would you think of a nurse in an emergency room who went into floods of tears every time a child was brought in in a terrible state?
I would think they were incompetent.
Kate Adie: Thank you. Well, what do you think we’re doing? It’s called professionalism. It doesn’t mean you don’t feel things, but that’s not part of the job.
Any regrets?
Kate Adie: Of course not. I have to tell you: you have your life to live ahead of you, and you’re wasting your time if you look back and have regrets. Not that you shouldn’t try and do things better the next time, but if you sit on your life with regrets it’s sad. There is no rehearsal. You live life. You seize it with both hands. This is our chance to live life – live it.
Any words of advice for budding journalists?
Kate Adie: Stick to the facts and be fair. The media is undergoing enormous changes. There is a revolution underway, and nobody knows where it’s going to end. Technology is changing. There are massive opportunities for the world to be better informed, better educated. But there are also opportunities for a large number of people to giggle themselves to death.
What do you mean?
Kate Adie: Reading rubbish on Twitter and all the other stuff.
So you’re not a fan of social media?
Kate Adie: I don’t do any of that. I would immediately analyse the word ‘friend’ online. You haven’t got friends; you don’t know them. You don’t know how they sound, how they behave. This is an artificial construction. I’d rather someone went down to a coffee house and introduced themselves to people and made contacts rather than have artificial friends; that’s journalism.
Do you think there’s an overload of information these days?
Kate Adie: I don’t think it’s too much information, because we have huge minds which can absorb many things if you train them. The point is that you have to be able to discriminate between information that is significant, useful, enriching and not trivial rubbish.
Who’s your idol?
Kate Adie: I’ve never had one. Role models weren’t really invented when I got into the business. Nobody ever mentioned them. Although I think Martha Gellhorn was a tremendous reporter.
Source: emirateswoman.com