Gary O’Donoghue on Journalism, Blindness, and a Career at the BBC

Gary O’Donoghue on Journalism, Blindness, and a Career at the BBC

Karina Sturm: Welcome to the Global Disability News Network podcast, powered by GADIM, the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment. We are a disabled-led, accessible multimedia platform where disability isn’t a side note. It’s the lens. We report on how systems, culture and everyday life affect disabled people around the world, while centering disabled perspectives. My name is Karina Sturm. I’m the news director of the Global Disability News Network and your co-host, and with me is co-host and fellow journalist Amy Zayed.

Amy Zayed: Hello.

Karina Sturm: We’re talking about journalism, which seems obvious, which is a field that’s often reserved for non-disabled people, but our guest proves otherwise. Joined by BBC Chief North America Correspondent Gary O’Donoghue, one of the UK’s most prominent blind journalists. Tell us, Amy. We discuss reaching leading positions, overcoming workplace and societal stigma, leveraging technical aids, and pushing back against discrimination in journalism. Welcome, Gary.

Gary O’Donoghue: Thank you very much for having me.

Karina Sturm: Thank you for being here. Shall we describe ourselves for our blind audience? Amy, do you want to start?

Amy Zayed: As I’ve made it a kind of a regular thing to change my T-shirt every time I do this podcast, I decided to go for a really colorful T-shirt today with buttons on the front. It’s got a lot of orange in there, which is one of the reasons I picked it, because orange is one of… red and orange are the only colors that I can see, so I picked this one. I’ve got my hair up in a ponytail. I am a woman of color in her very early fifties. I’ve got really shiny red highlights in my hair. Today I don’t wear earrings, which is a shame. I didn’t have time to put on my earrings because I was having panic attacks. I’ll tell you about them later. Yeah, that’s kind of me today in a nutshell.

Gary O’Donoghue: Wow, I have to follow that. So I’m Gary O’Donoghue and I’m 58 years old. I’m white. I have brown hair. I’ve just had a haircut, so it’s, I would say, not quite short, but not long. I think I’m wearing a blue shirt today, but I’m not entirely certain of that.

Karina Sturm: I can confirm.

Gary O’Donoghue: Okay, there we go. Yeah, that’s about me.

Karina Sturm: Awesome. And just a brief description of myself. So I have a short brown pixie cut. I’m wearing headphones, so you don’t really see my hair. They look messy. I have golden glasses and I’m wearing a pink tank top, and I’m sitting in my bedroom so you see lots of clutter in the background. Very good. So Gary, Amy told me that you were a footballer first, and now you’re a journalist. So how did that happen?

Gary O’Donoghue: It’s a bit of an exaggeration. I was mad keen on football when I was very young, and because I went to blind schools from the age of eight, football was a big deal for me, certainly. My father was very keen on soccer and football, and he used to take me over the park all the time when I was at home during the holidays. And we used to play it every day effectively at school from the age of about 12 to 16. And I loved it. And eventually, in the very, very early days of the Blind England team, I got a chance to play for them a couple of times. In fact, we went to a tournament in Spain when I was about 16 or 17, I think. And so yeah, so that was my sorry. But then once I went to university and stuff like that, I stopped playing, which is a bit of a shame really, because after that blind football really took off as a really well organized sport and became a sort of Paralympic sport and all that sort of thing, which I wouldn’t have been good enough for, but I loved it and it was a big part of my growing up.

Amy Zayed: So what was the reason to turn to journalism? Or has it always been kind of your goal? Was it something you…

Gary O’Donoghue: No, it hasn’t. I fell into it a little bit, I think. When I was at university, I did a degree in French and philosophy. It was a sort of literature and philosophy degree, basically. And I wasn’t entirely sure what… I had no great sort of intent about what I wanted to do. I thought I might do something in computing, because I’d done a computer science A level, and I quite liked the sort of high-level systems design, and I remember applying to a couple of companies half-heartedly. But there was a kind of random moment, I think probably at the end of my first year, beginning of my second year, where my dad, who was a black taxi driver in London, he randomly picked up a chap called Kevin Mulhern, who was a blind TV producer who had his own program back in those days, a sort of disability magazine program called Link. And they got chatting, and Kevin said, “Why don’t you send him along to watch the program go out?” And so that sort of chance meeting, I went up to Birmingham, watched them put this magazine program together. I was a bit taken by the whole sort of glitz of it, really, and the sort of the art of producing these programs. And from then, after that, I got some introductions from there, knocked on a few doors, got a chance to do some work experience at the BBC during the university vacations. And then because I was doing a language degree, I had to go abroad for a year, and I went to Paris, lived in Paris for a year and was meant to go to classes at the university at the Sorbonne. Didn’t really do that, but started doing little packages, little pieces of radio for the In Touch program, which as many of you will know is a magazine program for blind people on BBC radio in the UK. And they had a producer in those days called Thena Heshel [verify], who was an absolute giant inside the BBC. She was a legend. And she really nurtured me and gave me the skills and the space to learn. And I would go to the BBC’s Paris Bureau and borrow their reel-to-reel tape recorder to go out and do little interviews. And it really started. I got the bug from that sort of process, really. So by the end of the third year and back at university for my final year, that’s when I knew then that while all my friends were applying to be lawyers and bankers, I actually wanted to do that. So I fell into it in a strange way.

Karina Sturm: It’s interesting though, because I feel like the three of us, we all have kind of our journalistic roots in the UK, like Amy for sure. And I actually did my master’s degree in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Gary O’Donoghue: Oh, wow.

Karina Sturm: And we all are a couple of years apart from each other. So I don’t know how you feel about this, but as a journalist, I’ve always looked up to the UK because it always seemed like the UK has figured it out much better than other countries in terms of diversifying the workforce in journalism. Has this always been like that, or what was it like when you started?

Gary O’Donoghue: It’s a good question, and I suppose I’d have to… it’s slightly anecdotal, because I don’t know the picture across Europe particularly. But there were some people who were older than me that had blazed a trail. Blind people I was aware of, people like Peter White, who has been the presenter of the In Touch program and many other things for years, who were very supportive and had done some of this stuff ahead of me. So you feel you’re already climbing on the shoulders of others. And there were one or two other people as well. There weren’t that many. And of course, I was particularly interested in daily news and political news. That’s what I really enjoyed. And that path was pretty untrodden, that sort of immediate kind of daily news turnaround. So I remember, in the early days when I was working on the Today programme, which is the morning show on BBC speech radio here in the UK, and I was quite young and I got a chance on there. And that was at the point where if you were trying to do some research for a story, they had a news cuttings library that would literally photocopy newspaper cuttings, physical cuttings, onto big A3 sheets of paper. You’d say, “I want some background on this or that.” And there was no… I had no idea really how… no one to ask, “How do you cope with this? What do you do with this?” And I had to invent ways of trying to get help from colleagues or friends or girlfriends, trying to persuade girlfriends to read stuff in the evening. You think, “That’s not much of a date night, is it? I’ve got a bunch of cuttings, would you mind reading them to me?” And this was before all the kind of digitization and stuff like that. So there was a lot of stuff I had to try and make up as I went along. And I was happy to because I wanted to, but I think it was pretty stressful sometimes, trying to do a good job but also trying to invent the way of doing it at the same time.

Amy Zayed: Was it perceived by the editors? I remember at BFBS, for example, I was a complete mess at audio editing, reel-to-reel editing. Oh my God, I hated it. My hands were just not made for it. But they were very supportive about it. How did your editors, especially as a young reporter, how did they go about it?

Gary O’Donoghue: There was some. It always comes down, in my view, to the individuals. Some people, at whatever point in time, are just prepared to give you a chance, and they see whatever they see in you, even when you’re untested, untried. And I remember, when I was doing… I think it was at the end of, or just before my final year, when I got some work experience in news at the BBC, and an editor came up and said, “I think I saw something about a row over something in Cumbria the other day.” I can’t remember where it was, but it looked like a really interesting story. And I think it was a test. It was like, “Go and see if you can find this out.” And when I found out what it was, he said, “Oh, there might be a piece in there. Why don’t you ring some people up and we’ll get one of the reporters, if it’s interesting, to do it.” So it was like, do you have the initiative to get on the phone, find people, talk to them, find out what the story is? And I realized afterwards that it was a really good thing to do. It wasn’t hanging me out to dry. It was actually saying, “Let’s see how much initiative you’ve got.” And so they were very good about that. And eventually I did learn to edit quarter-inch tape, and I actually really enjoyed it. That was like five years into my career. Suddenly, reel-to-reel and old tape disappeared and the early digital editor came in. And again, you think, “God, I’ve mastered this one kind of technology and now there’s this new one coming along. Will I be able to at all?” And I remember getting a basic digital editor on a laptop and trying to work out, not just this new format and this new kind of workflow as a radio reporter, but how to make it, would it be in any way accessible? And as these things are, it’s never 100%, is it? It’s 20%, 40%, but is that good enough to use it efficiently and in a productive way? So these things have come along, and it’s similar now. There’s another revolution going on with social media and digital content and Instagram, TikTok, all these sorts of things, which means you have to do things in a different way and learn a different kind of vocabulary. And particularly, I’ve been working on Instagram stuff in the last year or so.

Amy Zayed: Do you have an account? I couldn’t find you.

Gary O’Donoghue: I do. Yeah, no, I do. But the thing I was going to say is that it’s really hard to consume it in order to know what works on it. So you’re having to rely on a lot of younger people to say, if you say, “Does this work if I do this minute like this and if I talk like this and present it like this? Is that what works?” Because you’re not actually a user of the platform, because it’s not that accessible really.

Karina Sturm: Isn’t that super annoying? Oh, sorry.

Amy Zayed: Sorry. No, I said it is nowadays. It used to be worse. I remember when I started Instagram back in 2014…

Gary O’Donoghue: What’s really annoying is if you, with like the Global Disability News Network and other channels, I always try to make it as accessible as possible with audio description at the beginning. But then you get punished by these platforms if you actually do that. Is that…

Karina Sturm: It’s because people have maybe 10 seconds of attention span. And if the first 10 seconds is an audio description, not the tagline or the clickbait line or whatever…

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah. Then they move on.

Karina Sturm: They click through and then that’s it.

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah. That’s one of the things I found with getting to grips with social video stuff in the last year or two, is having to almost write upside down. For radio, I would tell the story and then do the analysis at the end. We’ve actually got to give people the conclusion first almost, to keep them for a while. But that’s why I do YouTube, because people do stay on YouTube stuff longer. The attention span is longer. And of course you’re reaching audiences that wouldn’t typically watch a standard television news bulletin if your stuff is reversioned and put on YouTube. So I’m all for it, but it’s a sort of new skill to have to learn how to operate and what works on those platforms as a blind person.

Karina Sturm: Isn’t that super frustrating, if you constantly not only have to learn all the new platforms, like all sighted people as well, but then also need to pave your own way of how to use it and how to make it usable to you?

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah. You don’t need me to tell you two that. And this will apply to not just journalism, but other professions too. We have to paddle furiously under the surface all the time just to keep up. The extra time it takes to consume information, read information. I often say to people I work with, if a new thing comes along, a new piece of software or a new platform comes along, you might not like it, you might find it frustrating, you might not think it’s intuitive to use, et cetera. There’s a lot of extra work being a disabled person and trying to maintain a professional working life. You just have to work harder, and it’s like you have to be your own tech support, don’t you?

Amy Zayed: Absolutely.

Gary O’Donoghue: You have to understand it more than other people have to understand the stuff, because troubleshooting it is not always going to happen if you just ring up the support desk.

Karina Sturm: Speaking of finding creative ways and workarounds, can you two give me an example of one thing where you had to find a completely different way of working with a certain platform or technology or whatever?

Gary O’Donoghue: That’s a good question.

Amy Zayed: Hard one.

Gary O’Donoghue: I rely on colleagues a lot. The thing I do is, when you come across colleagues who understand, or have an inkling of what it is to be a blind person and how a blind person sees the world, and some people do get that, then I hold onto them tight, if you know what I mean. But there are tools now, for example. It is pretty straightforward to get a decent image description. So if you have a picture sent in a Teams chat or something like that, you don’t always now have to, as a blind person, say, “What is this?” It’s a few extra taps than anyone else has to do, but you do have a few options. And then there are lots of new tools coming out that will take a PDF, for example, and turn it into something that’s actually readable, because PDFs are notoriously difficult for screen reader users to navigate if they’re not tagged properly. And when you’re under pressure… I’ll give you an example. We often report on the Supreme Court judgments in the US, and the judgments come down at a particular time, 10 o’clock in the morning, and it’s a great big PDF, and other people can skim pretty quickly to the executive summary or the main points, but this is just this big block of stuff that with a screen reader is very hard to navigate. But these new tools have gone a long way to try and actually strip out and structure these things, so you can skip through them in many ways with a screen reader. And AI is going to make that stuff even better, I think. AI is going to be our friend, I think, as visually impaired people.

Amy Zayed: This actually leads me to one question, because we’re having this huge debate within the blind community in Germany at the moment, which is… I don’t know whether it’s happening in the US as well, but it definitely will happen everywhere. For example, Meta’s brought out their smart glasses, Ray-Ban, Ray-Ban smart glasses, and…

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah.

Amy Zayed: The blind community seems to have them, like the world and its mother. I so far am reluctant, not because I don’t want them. I’m definitely not one of the people who’s like, “No, my data protection is so important to me, and I never go on WhatsApp, and I never go on Google, and I never go on Facebook.” I’m not one of these people. But the idea is so tempting, because my focus in journalism is very much culture and popular culture, so I need Instagram, I need social a lot, not just to get information, but also to promote the stuff that I do. And to be able to actually do my own videos and take my own pictures with these glasses is immensely cool. And these glasses do… just for those people who have no clue about those, I’ll give you an idea. Actually they can read a menu to you if you like. They can navigate you, and you don’t need to have your mobile phone in your hands. You’ll just tell them where to go and they’ll navigate you. I can, for example, call you through these glasses and show you where I am, and you can actually navigate me if I don’t know where I’m going, because you’d see where I am.

Karina Sturm: Oh, okay.

Amy Zayed: That’s a bit of a problem. If it’s my picture, I don’t care. But for example, I did a documentary series for the BBC a couple of years ago about refugees, and they were already quite picky on whether we were allowed to take pictures. Now, if I had taken that picture with these smart glasses and they’d known they’d been on a Meta server, I’m not sure whether they would have said yes. So that’s the reason I’m a bit careful with that.

Gary O’Donoghue: Hmm.

Amy Zayed: But I hope that maybe Apple, because Apple’s data protection is a bit better, and maybe a few more people that are doing these, to take that monopoly off Meta, would be great. So how do you see it? Do you use them in your job or doing your work, Gary? Do you…

Gary O’Donoghue: Do I? Well, I do occasionally use them in my job, in the sense that I use them for navigation. I would use them because they could connect to things like the Aira service. Now, Aira is a visual interpretation service where you effectively dial up a sighted agent who can see through your phone or your camera or your Meta glasses, who’s trained in interpreting the world for blind people. It’s a paid service. They can guide you, because as we know as blind people, you can get about, but the last 25 or 30 meters is always the difficult bit, right? You get almost somewhere before finding the door. But the other thing I have used it for, and this has been a liberation for me, and it’s not because it’s glasses, but the glasses make it practically possible because it’s hands-free. For example, when I arrive at Heathrow in London, I used to have to wait for the assistance, and you would sometimes wait a long time, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the best experience. My daughter now guides me right through the terminal, from the plane, right through passport control, to the bag carousel, identifies my bag when it’s coming round. But it has been astonishingly liberating not to have to always rely on that help. So I use that, and I do use it for identifying things like basic stuff in the kitchen, for example. I have also in the past used, not the glasses, but the phone with the Aira service to take the odd picture. They do it as a sort of screenshot effectively. But if I was… I remember being at one of those terrible school shootings in the US, and I just wanted to say something on Twitter at the time, the developing news, just something that had happened that we’d heard from the police or something like that. And I just wanted a general shot of where we were, by the crime tape and the search lights and stuff like that. And they helped me frame and take, it’s not an award-winning picture, but a piece of media to go along with what I wanted to say. And because they’re trained agents, I was confident enough that it was what I wanted to go along with the text. So I have done that in the past, and I don’t do that regularly because we have some people who can help with that stuff. But there are methods that you can use. The danger, of course, is that you end up spending so much of your energy managing the technology that there’s not much time or energy left for the journalism.

Amy Zayed: I love them. In Germany, for example, they’re making this big fuss about, oh my God, what if you take a picture and we don’t know that you’re taking a picture, or you’re harassing someone or molesting… And I think they’re obviously right, but then, I’m sorry, it’s something that gives me independence.

Gary O’Donoghue: Yes, there is a tension there. You’re right. There is a tension there. There’s a backlash against some of these smart glasses because, let’s be brutal, creepy men use them sometimes. They do. It means there is a backlash.

Amy Zayed: They do use the phones as well, so they use everything.

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah.

Karina Sturm: It’s always the creepy old man that makes this…

Gary O’Donoghue: They don’t become creepy because the glasses were invented. They were…

Karina Sturm: No, exactly. They’ve always been creepy and just use different means.

Gary O’Donoghue: But there is… I don’t know. We’ll see how the debate shakes down. I’d be amazed if the general public would see blind people using those sorts of things as a threat, if they understand how we’re using them.

Karina Sturm: No.

Amy Zayed: I think so.

Gary O’Donoghue: Hopefully.

Karina Sturm: Gary, have you always been a political correspondent, or did you consider other topics? I’m thinking about, what’s your opinion about a disabled journalist writing mostly about disability-related topics? Was it something you considered or somebody tried to push you into, or how did you end up where you are?

Gary O’Donoghue: It’s a good question, because I’ve done, at various points in my career… I started off doing disability-related stuff as a freelance while I was at university. But I was always interested in news and political news. But I have done stints as a general reporter as well on the Today programme in the UK. I was a general reporter for five years and loved the variety of that. And my view has always been that I don’t steer away from disability. That’s not my main focus, but if there’s something I think is interesting, I will do it, and I still do pieces occasionally for the In Touch program. They want me to do something quite shortly on driverless cars, because I went in some of those driverless cars in the US and got that experience, so they want me to go and talk about that. So I’ve never steered away from disability. It’s not my main interest, but it’s something that’s… I don’t think we have to choose, is what I suppose…

Amy Zayed: Exactly, yeah. Absolutely with you on that. And I think probably the reason we’re asking is, in Germany, for example, we’re tokenized quite a bit. I feel that very often. But I’m exactly like you. I like both. I enjoy doing this here. It’s amazing. But then I just love doing my main focus, which is culture and pop and stuff and crazy stuff like, I don’t know, just films and I don’t know, fashion and…

Gary O’Donoghue: Variety is good.

Amy Zayed: Yeah. Or news, like sometimes when I do stuff about refugees or all those. But how do you… what was it? Obviously, when you started, it wasn’t something normal to have a blind person on telly. Now I guess in the UK, people know you and have seen you quite a lot. How was that perceived at the beginning, and was it hard for you? Because in Germany, for example, I remember back in the day when I did my program traineeship, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to take TV lessons with my other colleagues because I’d just be in the way, and a blind person wouldn’t be on TV anyway, would he?

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah, I think that was pretty similar in the early days for me. I think there was an assumption that you couldn’t do television if you’re a blind person. And I think a lot of people felt that you’d, I don’t know, maybe frightened the audiences. I don’t know what they thought would happen, because I’ve always found actually that the general public’s ahead of the curve on these things. It’s certainly my impression when I get stopped in the street that they’re very nice. But what was interesting is that I had to learn the grammar of television in a different way. Writing to pictures, for example. I think I ask more questions that are more rigorous than even some of my colleagues when it comes to making sure the words complement the pictures rather than just echoing what you can see, which is the way you’re meant to write for television. But I do remember asking people, for example. I was thinking, if I’m doing something live and I want to read a statement out that we’ve got, and I’ve got it in braille, I remember saying to people, “How can we frame this so it doesn’t look weird?” Because as you hold braille, if you’re standing up, you hold it against yourself to read it, against your body, the piece of paper. And if the shot is midway up your middle or just below your chest, then it would look strange, because people would see your arms moving out of frame and think, “What on earth’s going on?” So I remember trying to talk to people and say, “What’s the best way to frame this so people could see what’s happening without being a distraction?” And it was very hard in those days to get people to engage in those sort of questions. I think they felt they might say the wrong thing or they didn’t really know. So some of that sort of stuff I had to almost direct myself and say to the camera person I was with, “Look, I’ve got to hold this piece of paper in this sort of way and I’ll be reading braille, so make the shot looser so people can actually see what I’m doing.” And I’m lucky enough now that people who see me on TV know that I’m blind, but there would’ve been a period of time where they were finding that out, in terms of our audience, and that may have been a little bit of a distraction to start with. But after a while they’re listening. Once they’ve clocked that, they stop caring about it, in my experience. But for example, I don’t know if this is too much detail, but if I’m working with a cameraman… I often work with cameramen and camera women that I know very well, but if I’m working with a freelancer I’ve used before or we haven’t used, I will be very explicit with them. I’ll say, “Look, you must absolutely tell me if I’m not properly looking down the barrel when I’m live. Don’t be nice about this, because if I’m looking off a bit, if I talk to you and I look over here, it’s a complete distraction and the viewer’s no longer going to listen to you. It’s not trying to be sighted. I’m not trying to be a sighted person, but I do need to respect some of the grammar of television, which means you don’t give the audience a reason to stop listening to what you’re saying.” So I do what I call my eye line. I say, “You’ve got to bully me. If the eye line’s wrong, I want to know. Don’t hold back.” And the producers I work with know that. And they know, for example, if you’ve got an egg stain on your shirt or your tie, don’t mess around, tell me. I’ll do something about it, but don’t try and be polite about that. And people did in the early days, they did try to hop from foot to foot because they didn’t want to say something like that.

Amy Zayed: I think it’s one of the things that I always… when I do coaching, sometimes I do, because I’m a freelancer and have to take any work that gets in my way. So I do coachings, inclusion coachings, and sometimes it’s about communication with blind people, and I say, “The thing about us is…” Especially us journalists, we will always be quite upfront because we don’t know any other way to communicate. We cannot [inaudible] at you in some way. We cannot smile in a certain way. So all we have is verbal communication, so we’ll always be quite upfront. So whether you like it or not doesn’t matter. It’s just the only way we can.

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right. And it’s also a sort of a superpower, I think. It’s one of the reasons that journalism is a really good fit for blind people, because, depending on when you lose your sight, but as a blind person you’ve been forced in a way to listen to other people, to interpret them and how they’re being with you. Put yourself outside yourself and in other people’s shoes. It often ends up being down to us to put people at their ease, and as you say, using verbal communication as the absolute mainstay of what we do. And what is journalism other than talking to people and finding out stuff and stories? It’s a perfect fit, I think, in many ways for blind people who have those skills by dint of being visually impaired themselves.

Karina Sturm: Do you feel like sometimes it might even be a benefit? Are there people that feel more comfortable telling their stories to blind people?

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that’s been true in the past for me. I’ve certainly noticed times where you’re not… I don’t know if it’s that you’re not a threat, I don’t know what it is, but people are a bit more receptive sometimes. I used to say it’s, in what we call a doorstep, where you’re knocking on someone’s door who doesn’t want to talk, it’s just slightly harder to slam the door in the face of a blind person.

Amy Zayed: I have to say it depends on the person also. I’ve witnessed both. I’ve witnessed people who are like that, but then sometimes… I remember doing this interview with someone who’s now a really good friend, Kelly Jones, Stereophonics, if you’re listening, hiya mate. I remember our first interview. I was very young. I was about 21, and he was still in his heyday, and I was coming to interview him, and he was pissed off with his manager. He had the worst day in his life, and he saw me and he asked the manager, no, the promoter, “So who’s this blind B-journalist interviewing me?” And I was sitting there with my braille sheet and I thought, “I’ll give you B-journalist in a minute, you idiot.” And I was like 21, really, you know me, really upfront and big mouth as always. And he just sat right in front of me and said, “So shall we do this interview or do you want to rather sod off and not do that interview with that journalist then?” And he was like, “Let’s go ahead then.” And then I asked him a couple of questions, he answered, it was, yeah, okay. And I said, “You know what?” At the end of the day, I said, “Just out of interest, because I’ve wasted my last 15 minutes asking you questions and you’ve given me some half-okay answers, but what is it that puts you off today? What the hell is it? What does put you off? You can tell me or not, while we’re sitting here. Maybe you can just have a rant at something that really pisses you off rather than me.” And then he started telling me that he was pissed off with his manager, and he didn’t want to do the support for Bon Jovi, and he hit…

Gary O’Donoghue: So you got the story.

Amy Zayed: And I got the story. And then at the end, he was like… And I said, “Now you’ve given me a wonderful story. Thanks for that.” And he was like, “Freaking hell, I didn’t want to tell you all that.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s the B-journalist these days.” And he was like, “Touché.” And then he was like, “Listen, can I have this braille sheet?” And I said, “I’ll have to think about it. Maybe next time.” And then I thought, “I’m never going to hear of him again.” I thought, “Great.” Two years later, Stereophonics bringing out a new album, and all of a sudden I get a call from the record company. “Amy, he’s doing one interview in Germany, and he’s insisting on you doing this.” And now we’re good friends, I’ve met him many times and know his wife and stuff. But yeah, that’s how our friendship started. So it depends.

Gary O’Donoghue: We are memorable, that’s the other thing.

Amy Zayed: True.

Gary O’Donoghue: We stand out, don’t we, in that sort of way, and that can be really useful.

Karina Sturm: Gary, how did you end up in the US? I mean, particularly as a polite person from the UK, what’s it like with the Americans?

Gary O’Donoghue: It’s a good question. I’ve been there over a decade now, and I’d focused quite a lot on what we call domestic, so UK-based news, for the first part of my career. And an opportunity came along, and I just found it a fascinating idea to go and cover… Washington is obviously the kind of political center of the world in many ways. It was very appealing. And I went there at a sort of fortuitous time, because it was 2015 and it’s just the beginning of the whole kind of rise of Donald Trump, et cetera. So it’s been a huge rollercoaster. And I think I went to America like quite a lot of journalists do, thinking, God, this is weird, isn’t it? And when you spend more time there, I love the place and I love the people. And I feel I have a much better understanding than certainly when I went.

Karina Sturm: I used to live in San Francisco for seven years or so, which I loved, but also San Francisco is this little bubble of very diverse, lots of disabled people, lots of queer people, which was really my world. But I did find it much harder living there after Trump became president for the first time. So I was just curious because there’s lots of changes right now in the US that also directly affect you as a disabled person. And I’m just curious, how did this feel to you? Did you ever consider going back to the UK or were you like, “Nope, I’m staying, whatever happens”?

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve felt directly impacted by any of that. I don’t really think so. In a sense, professionally, you are always taking a step back, aren’t you, and trying to judge things professionally and in a way to explain them to the audience. So it’s not something that I’ve personally dwelt on in particular. And there are groups in the US that are under a lot of pressure, with the emphasis that this administration has had on various policies and things like that. But what do I want to say about disabled people? The organized disabled movement in America is pretty strong, certainly amongst blind people. They lobby a lot, and I know they’re very frustrated with some of the foot dragging, not actually just from the Trump administration, but from other Democrat administrations as well, on things like web accessibility and guidelines to make sure companies do the right thing. That’s been a sort of theme over the last couple of decades for those organizations. And I think it’s ironic in a way that the Americans got the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, what is it, 30-odd years ago now. But in some ways, certainly in journalism, for example, you don’t see a lot of disabled people in high-profile roles. I have a blind friend who works at the Wall Street Journal, she has a high-profile job. But trying to think of other people in journalism, blind or disabled people, you struggle. You don’t really see too many of them. There was an amazing story a few years ago of a very famous presenter on one of the cable news channels, who disclosed that he had multiple sclerosis, but also said at the same time that he’d hidden it for 10 years, and the focus was on, rightly, holding down his job whilst having a degenerative condition like that. Whereas I was thinking to myself, that’s not a great system that made him feel he had to hide it either. But it was a sort of lesson, I felt, in a way, that there’s not a lot of disabled people in journalism in the US, which is a pity, I think.

Amy Zayed: It’s always a bit different in the UK. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I always felt it’s slightly different.

Gary O’Donoghue: Yeah, I think there are a bunch of blind people in the BBC nowadays. There are people with other disabilities and hidden disabilities as well, and other news organizations here have also stepped up a bit, and policies and initiatives, and started to use people a bit more than they did. But I think there’s always a bit of a, where is the supply of people coming through? I sometimes mentor blind journalism students, and they are still struggling with the same things as I struggled with at their age, and they’re still having the same sort of battles over technology and getting people to give them a chance and things like that. So I think the atmosphere is better. And the one thing that encourages me is that the generations below me, people in their sort of 30s now who are getting into positions of editorial responsibility, non-disabled people getting into those positions, I find are much more open to someone like me or other disabled people being on their programs or on air than my generation is, for example. I find that enormously encouraging, actually, that there is a sort of… I don’t know how general this is, but it seems to be, in my little corner of the world, a sort of change which is very welcome.

Amy Zayed: It’s obviously up to you how far you want to go in answering this, but you’re one of the people that stepped up very much for your own rights in the BBC, and a lot of blind people and disabled people in general that I’ve asked said, “Without Gary, we probably wouldn’t have got where we are at the BBC.” A, I’d say, would you see it like that? And B, do you think it’s still something that people would have to do these days, to go that far, even to stand up to your own employer?

Gary O’Donoghue: I hope not. It’s a tricky thing to decide to do, obviously, because in some ways, whether you’re right, whether you’re successful or not, or whether you get through it or not, it could make things enormously difficult. I was always very reluctant to go down that road and felt that I had to eventually. It’s probably for others to say whether it’s made any difference more generally for other people, but I do think, and I know other blind people in journalism share this view, I do think I have a responsibility to people who come after, in a way that people who were before me blazed the trail. I think it is something we have a duty to do, which is to show the world that it’s possible. I get lots of emails from parents of blind children who, for the vast majority, just want to say, it’s great to see you doing what you do, just because they feel isolated or really unsure about their child’s future. Not that they want them to necessarily be journalists, but that there are potential futures, even if you find yourself with a parent of a blind child and you wonder what the future is, because as we know, blindness is one of those disabilities that people are terrified of. It’s right up there in terms of what frightens people, more than many other things. People are very fearful. We’ve always been very fearful of it, and so demonstrating that there can be a life, I think, is useful in itself. It’s still pretty depressing, though, that the unemployment numbers among blind people generally are stubbornly terrible, aren’t they? They’ve been at this sort of 70, 75% unemployment level for years in most Western democracies, for example. They don’t seem to shift. Yeah, it’s huge, and it doesn’t shift very much, so that is depressing, I must say.

Amy Zayed: Because I thought blind people were easy to employ, I thought.

Gary O’Donoghue: I think employers are a bit scared of blindness in many ways, I think, to be honest. They don’t understand it or are terrified about what’s involved. Yeah, it’s tricky, because the numbers have been consistent for a long time. It cannot be that three quarters of blind people are too lazy to work, can it? It’s got to be a systemic problem of some kind, in terms of employment or education for employment or that sort of thing.

Karina Sturm: You’ve shared a lot of your personal experiences with us, but I’m wondering if, to end the podcast, we could share an empowering message with future blind journalists or disabled journalists overall. What would you tell them if they told you, “I really want to do journalism”?

Gary O’Donoghue: I got an award last year from the Royal Television Society, which was a big high point for me. It was for my coverage of the attempted assassination of Trump. And the little speech I gave after that, I said, to those disabled and blind journalists out there, budding, in college courses, my message was, don’t take no for an answer. It is possible. I can’t promise you won’t come up against attitudes and people who don’t believe you can do it, because you will. It would be ridiculous to tell people that the path and the road is a smooth one. But if you want to do it, just persevere and take every opportunity you can. And when you come across those people who are prepared to take a chance on you, grab those opportunities as much as you can and skill up as much as possible. That’s what I would say. I do think it’s a great path if you’re a blind person. I think, as I said before, I think it’s a bit of a natural fit in some ways, because it’s about talking and listening and finding out stuff.

Karina Sturm: All right, thank you so much, Gary, for joining us. This was…

Gary O’Donoghue: Oh, thank you for having me on. Keep up the good work, you two.