Gary O'Donoghue, journalist
6/14/202651 min
Journalist Gary O’Donoghue is the Chief North America Correspondent for BBC News. Last year his coverage of the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump won the Royal Television Society Breaking News Award. He made the news himself in 2025 when he secured a 20-minute exclusive phone interview with Trump who was by then the US President.
Gary was born in London and brought up in Essex. When he was eight he lost his sight and attended specialist schools for blind and partially sighted children. He read philosophy and modern languages at the University of Oxford before embarking on his BBC career.
He has reported on mass shootings, filed stories from the Macedonian border during the Kosovo conflict, covered the Iraq War and chronicled seven British general elections. He became the BBC’s Washington correspondent in 2014 and, as well as Donald Trump’s two terms, has covered the administrations of Presidents Obama and Biden.
Gary is based in Washington DC and when in the UK lives in West Yorkshire with his partner Sarah.
Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Paula McGinley
Desert Island Discs has cast other journalists away to the island over the years including Lyse Doucet, Clive Myrie and Lindsey Hilsum, You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or our own Desert Island Discs website.
This episode was recorded before the shooting at the White House Correspondent's Dinner on 25th April 2026.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLauren Laverne· Host0:00
Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast from BBC Radio 4. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast, but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds. Listeners will also get access to episodes twenty-eight days earlier than everyone else. I hope you enjoy listening. [waves crashing] [instrumental music] My castaway this week is the journalist Gary O'Donohue. He's the Chief North America Correspondent for BBC News. Last year, his coverage of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, conducted live as the incident unfolded, won the Royal Television Society Breaking News Award. His interview with an eyewitness, which was rebroadcast by every major news network, was watched by more than three hundred million people on social media and nominated for an Emmy. Viewers were impressed by his journalistic skills and by the fact that he was covering an event he could not actually see. Gary is blind. In fact, he's the first disabled person to be posted as a BBC foreign correspondent.