Kate Adie was one of the few trailblazing women who were pushing
their way into the spotlight through the dense mass of the male-dominated workforce. She began her career during the late 1960s where women were an extreme
minority in the fields of broadcasting. During an interview, she stated “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 did not figure at all. I came into a world
of work where you were expected to find barriers against you”. She worked her
way through the inequality to make herself stand out and become the important broadcaster
we know her as today. She got to experience during the 1970s the legal rights
to equal pay and opportunities that were being brought in by law.
She started by
obtaining a position as a station assistant at BBC Radio Durham, and then
became a producer for Radio Bristol. She then transferred to television news where
few women were working as reporters. She was reporting for regional TV News in
Plymouth and Southampton and would join the national news team in 1976. There she
experienced resistance due to her gender where people were reluctant to accept
a woman doing this job and even assigning females to the less serious topics. When
asked about this she stated “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 patronizing.
The assumption was that you were a personal assistant”. Most people believed
that reporting overall, especially more important topics including economics
and crime, should be left to the males yet there were some exceptions. Kate
Adie was fortunate to have the seniors of her news organization to be liberal-minded so that they allowed her to report on more essential topics. While Adie had
this advantage most women during this time did not and they were stuck with
either no work at all or left with the fluff topics.
Kate managed to be at
the right place at the right time when it came to one of her most important
covers of London’s Iranian Embassy raid. She stated that she was asked to
cover for a senior reporter during the sixth day of the siege and moments after
she arrived the SAS raided the embassy. This was considered to be her big break
and following this, she was soon dispatched to conflicts all around the globe. She
reported on many memorable events such as both Gulf Wars, four years of war in
the Balkans, and the final NATO intervention in Kosovo and elections in 2000. She
also reported the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster at Zeebrugge, the massacre
at Dunblane, the Selby rail crash, the Bologna railway station bombing, and the
Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing in 1989. These monumental and historical
events that Adie reported on showed that women were capable of reporting the
essential news and not just the fluff news. The list of crucial assignments she
completed continues with the Lockerbie bombing, multiple reports in Northern
Ireland throughout The Troubles, reported on the referendum to ratify the Good
Friday Agreement, the bombing of Tripoli by the US in 1986, the Rwandan
Genocide, and the British military intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War.
Shown by the immense amount of assignments Kate Adie has reported on truly
shows how not only versatile she was but how she proves how capable she was. She
completed important tasks by informing the public about these significant
topics but the fact that she was a woman being entrusted with these events was
almost as monumental as some of the events she was reporting on. This was a
great stride towards the search for equality in fields such as broadcasting
where people felt as though only a man could do that job. Kate Adie not only
proves that she was meant to be a groundbreaking reporter but that it was
possible for all other women too.
Kate Adie was also a successful
author who wrote multiple novels including her first book that examined her
life as a reporter, The Kindness of Strangers, which won the Sunday
Times bestseller list for 37 weeks. Others include Corsets to Camouflage, Nobody’s
Child, Into Danger, and Fighting the Home Front: The Legacy of Women in
World War One. On top of all the books and assignments she completed, she
also served as a judge for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Bailey’s, the
Whitbread, the Costa Prize, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She also served as a
trustee of the Imperial War Museum and the Sunderland Football Foundation. Her importance
to the broadcasting world did not go unrecognized shown by her countless awards
and honors. Adie has honorary degrees from universities such as Newcastle,
Bath, Nottingham, Cardiff, and St Andrews. Kate Adie is also an honorary
professor of journalism at Sunderland University and was honored with a Bafta
Fellowship in 2018. Other awards she received included the Royal television
Society Reporter of the Year 1980, won the 1981 and 1990 Monte Carlo
International Golden Nymph Award, and the Richard Dimbleby BAFTA Award in 1990.
Her extensive lists of awards exhibit not only her ability to achieve this
great but the chance for all women to reach for their dreams.
Adie needed to show immeasurable
power to prove to the world that she capable of being one of the most significant
reporters even today’s patriarchal dominated society. She resigned from BBC in
2003 after being sidelined ahead of the expected conflict with Iraq. This apparently
mutual decision to step down ended her 34-year career though she continued to
work as a freelance presenter for BBC. Kate Adie was marginalized at the BBC while
working there possibly due to her outspoken criticisms of the corporation. She believes
she was been overlooked due to her bosses being “obsessed with “cute faces and
cute bottoms and nothing else in between”. This theory can be accredited by her
receiving only a peripheral role during the war in Afghanistan which appears to
have motivated her resignation. Though Kate Adie and many other influential
women worked to destroy the sexist notions that women cannot excel in these
male-dominated workforces there is still much more work to achieve.
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