What does the world think about us? BBC news anchor will have plenty to talk about in Sunday lecture

What does the world think about us? BBC news anchor will have plenty to talk about in Sunday lecture

A Washington-based correspondent and anchor for BBC news should have plenty to talk about in an upcoming University of St. Thomas lecture about how the rest of the world views U.S. politics.

Katty Kay, who regularly anchors the evening news programs seen on BBC World television, will discuss “Washington From a Global Perspective” at 8 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 12, in the Brady Educational Center auditorium on the university's south campus.

The talk is free and open to the public. Sponsors are St. Thomas’ University Lectures Committee and STAR (St. Thomas Activities and Recreation). For more information, call Benjamin Nebo, chair of the University Lectures Committee, at (651) 962-6136.

Katty Kay

BBC World is the BBC’s commercially funded 24-hour news and information channel that is available in a quarter of a million households worldwide. In this country, the news programs are available via cable and satellite on BBC America and on some public television stations.

In addition to her work on BBC, Kay appears frequently on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and “The Chris Matthews Show” to comment on U.S. politics and international affairs. She also has appeared on the CNN, HBO, FOX, CNBC and PBS networks.

Kay's career with the BBC began in Zimbabwe in 1990 where she started filing radio reports for the Africa service of BBC World Service Radio. Among the stories she covered were the independence of Namibia and the demise of apartheid in South Africa.

From Africa she went on to work as a BBC correspondent in London and later Tokyo, where she covered the Kobe earthquake, the gas attack on the Tokyo underground and the beginning of the Japanese economic recession.

From Washington, Kay has covered sex scandals in the Clinton Administration, two presidential elections and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. She also witnessed first-hand the huge change in American policy and psyche brought on by the attacks of Sept. 11.

Kay was at the Pentagon just 20 minutes after a hijacked airplane slammed into the building. One of her most vivid journalistic memories is of interviewing soldiers still visibly shaking from the attack. She later anchored the BBC coverage of the 2004 election and traveled across the country through the campaign. She was outside the White House on election night and remembers thinking there might be something suspect about the early exit polls when Democrats said they were just one percent behind in Virginia.

For her evening broadcast, Kay recently interviewed former President Bill Clinton, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, and movie star and refugee activist Angelina Jolie.

Kay grew up in the Middle East, where her father was posted as a British diplomat. She studied modern languages at Oxford and is fluent in French and Italian, and is “rusty” in Japanese. She juggles her journalism with raising four children with her husband, Tom Carver, a former BBC correspondent.