BBC’s Kate Adie wins Lifetime Achievement Award

Friday 28 Oct 2011
The International Women’s Media Foundation has given its Lifetime Achievement Award to the BBC’s Kate Adie, at the group’s 2011 Courage in Journalism Awards, the Washington Post reports. 

The awards recognise those who risk their lives to cover the news.

The BBC’s first chief news correspondent became one of the best-known faces on television for her reporting from the major wars of recent years.

Her decades on the job have taken her from Afghanistan to the Tiananmen Square protests, to the war in Bosnia. She has slept in graves, been shot in the elbow and still has shrapnel in her foot.

“Reporting is a privilege,” Ms Adie, 66, said in her acceptance speech during the awards ceremony in New York last night. “Tell the world. That’s it: the responsibility and the privilege.”

The three courage award winners are Adela Navarro Bello, 43, General Director of Zeta newsmagazine in Tijuana, Mexico; Parisa Hafezi, 41, who is the Reuters Bureau Chief in Tehran, Iran; and Chiranuch Premchaiporn, 44, Webmaster and Director of the Prachatai online newspaper.