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Reporter: being blind might help - 19th August 2024

Gary O’Donoghue works for the BBC. He’s a reporter, and he’s also blind. He was reporting at a big Donald Trump meeting when he heard gunshots. Someone tried to kill the ex-president.

When the danger was over, O’Donoghue talked to people who saw what had happened. He interviewed a man whose name was Greg Smith.

Smith was holding a beer. He was wearing a pro-Trump hat with funny fake hair. But he also had important information about the shooter.

Other reporters ignored Smith but O’Donoghue didn’t know what he looked like. Smith had seen the shooter on a roof. He’d told the police about it, but they did nothing.

O’Donoghue’s been blind since he was 8 years old. People said that he couldn’t be a reporter. But he studied hard and got a place at Oxford University.

After university, he joined BBC Radio as a reporter. In 2015, he became the BBC’s top political reporter in the US.

O’Donoghue can read braille quickly. He uses screen readers on computers and walks with a long white stick. He thinks that blindness helps him because he can understand things in a different way.

O’Donoghue wants to support other blind and disabled reporters, and says that, sometimes, seeing isn’t good for journalism.

Photo credit: Tim Kennedy, CC BY 2.0 and SWinxy CC BY 4.0 via Wikicommons