Kathryn Adie , known as Kate Adie, 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. She retired from the BBC in early 2003 and now works as a freelance presenter with From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4.
Her career with the BBC began as a station assistant at BBC Radio Durham, after graduating in Scandinavian Studies. In 1976, she was a regional TV news reporter in Plymouth and Southampton, and moved to BBC national news in 1979. She was the duty reporter one evening in May 1980 and first on the scene when the Special Air Service 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. This proved to be her big break. Adie was thereafter regularly dispatched to report on disasters and conflicts throughout the 1980s, including the The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986, 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 most significant assignments was to report the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Nearly thirty years later, she said that she and her team were the only crew out in the square, and that they 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". Major assignments followed in the Gulf War, the war in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the war in Sierra Leone in 2000. 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. While she was in Yugoslavia, her leg was injured in Bosnia and she met Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić. 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." 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". In 2003 Adie retired from the BBC, where she had been Chief News Correspondent and began work as a freelance journalist and also as a public speaker, and presents 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. She is of Irish descent. In 2017 she was one of the speakers at the Gibraltar International Literary Festival. A June 2018 news report stated that she was living in Dorset and was still working as a freelance journalist, public speaker and presenter of From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4. In that same year, after receiving her CBE, Adie warned the public that journalism was under attack: Adie was appointed Chancellor of Bournemouth University on 7 January 2019, succeeding Baron Phillips of Worth Matravers. In her address, she warned postgraduate journalism students that confirming information and verifying news sources were critical in this 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!".
Adie's role as a BBC television journalist covering the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege in Princes Gate, central London, is included in 6 Days. The role was played by actress Abbie Cornish. The satirical British puppet TV showSpitting Image depicted Adie as a thrill seeker giving her the title "BBC Head of Bravery" and featuring her puppet in dangerous situations.
Personal life
In 1993, she was able to find her birth family, which was reported against her wishes.
