Sam Kiley

Last updated

Sam Kiley (born 1964, Kenya) is a Senior International Correspondent at CNN. [1] Prior to CNN, he was the Foreign Affairs Editor of Sky News. [2] [3] [4] He is a journalist with over twenty years' experience, based at different times of his career in London, Los Angeles, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Jerusalem. He has written for The Times , The Observer , The Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday newspapers, The Spectator and New Statesman weekly political news magazines, and reported for BBC Two, Sky One, Channel 4, and lately, Sky News.

Contents

On 27 November 2017, it was announced that he would be leaving Sky News and moving to CNN's Abu Dhabi bureau as a senior international correspondent. [5]

Education

Kiley was educated at Eastbourne College, [6] a boarding independent school for boys (now co-educational) in the large coastal town of Eastbourne in East Sussex, followed by Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics, [7] and graduated in 1984.

While at Lady Margaret Hall, he became president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and played cricket for the university second eleven. He also studied mime and commedia del arte under Neil Bartlett, director at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.[ citation needed ]

Life and career

After leaving Eastbourne College, and before going up to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, Kiley was commissioned into the Gurkhas Regiment of the British Army. He resigned from the Army halfway through university.

In 1987, Kiley joined The Times newspaper, where he became an education reporter. Three years later, he joined The Sunday Times newspaper as its US West Coast correspondent. The following year, he moved to Nairobi as The Times' Africa correspondent, from where his coverage of Somalia, Zaire, Rwanda and Sierra Leone won widespread acclaim.

In 1996, Kiley won the Granada Television Foreign Correspondent of the Year award for his coverage of the fall of the regime of President Mobutu in Zaire and, after being promoted to The Times' Africa bureau chief, moved to Johannesburg in South Africa. He was shot covering a coup attempt in Lesotho in 1998.

In 1999, Kiley moved to Jerusalem where he became The Times' Middle East bureau chief for two years, before resigning after a dispute with his editors. Kiley had succeeded in tracking down and interviewing the Israeli soldiers who had shot dead Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy who had become, posthumously, an icon of the intifada. The instruction Kiley received to file his piece "without mentioning the dead kid" was the last straw. [8]

In 2001, he joined the London Evening Standard newspaper as its chief foreign correspondent based in London – covering the wars in Afghanistan and the Second Intifada in the Palestinian Territories.

In 2002, Kiley presented "Truth and Lies in Baghdad", part of Channel 4 television's main current affairs series, Dispatches . He joined the channel full-time the following year and made many more programmes for Dispatches and for Unreported World , for both of which programmes he travelled across the world.

While covering the 2003 invasion of Iraq for Channel 4, he was kidnapped along with his Iraqi helpers and cameraman Nick Hughes, taken into the desert, and narrowly escaped execution due to what appears to have been a fluke.

In 2005, Kiley made two series for Sky One: USA Unsolved with Sam Kiley and Guns for Hire, the latter of which was an investigation into modern mercenaries in the war zones of Congo and Afghanistan.

In November 2006, Kiley produced a BBC2 observational documentary in Afghanistan, The General's War, for which he was granted exclusive and unprecedented access to British NATO General David Richards. He returned to Channel 4, to make films in Cape Town, the Congo, the Palestinian Territories, Russia and Kosovo. [9]

Since November 2010, Kiley has worked for Sky News, first as security editor, then defence and security editor in 2012, and in November 2012 he became Sky News's Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem.

On 14 August 2013, Kiley's cameraman Mick Deane was shot and killed whilst filming in Cairo. Kiley was working with him, reporting on the disturbances in the Middle East at the time. [10]

Publications

In 2009, Kiley wrote the book Desperate Glory: At War in Helmand with Britain's 16 Air Assault Brigade, based on his experiences as the only journalist to ever cover a full operational tour in Afghanistan, when he joined 16 Air Assault Brigade on its 2008 six-month deployment to Helmand. [11]

He has contributed essays to anthologies of writing among them: Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar, Simple Pleasures, Oxford Originals and is co-author of Journey Through Jordan with Duncan Willets and Mohammed Amin.[ citation needed ]

Family

Kiley is married to Melissa and has two children, Ella and Fynn. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Embedded journalism</span> Practice of attaching journalists to military units

Embedded journalism refers to news reporters being attached to military units involved in armed conflicts. While the term could be applied to many historical interactions between journalists and military personnel, it first came to be used in the media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The United States military responded to pressure from the country's news media who were disappointed by the level of access granted during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nic Robertson</span> British journalist

Nic Robertson is the international diplomatic editor of CNN.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Marshall (journalist)</span> British journalist, author, and broadcaster

Timothy John Marshall is a British journalist, author, and broadcaster, specialising in foreign affairs and international diplomacy. Marshall is a guest commentator on world events for the BBC, Sky News and a guest presenter on LBC, and was formerly the diplomatic and also foreign affairs editor for Sky News.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Bergen</span> American journalist

Peter Lampert Bergen is a British and American-based United States journalist, author, and producer who is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast In the Room with Peter Bergen.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greg Myre</span> American journalist

Greg Myre is an American journalist and an NPR national security correspondent with a focus on the intelligence community. Before joining NPR, he was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press and The New York Times for 20 years. He reported from more than 50 countries and covered a dozen wars and conflicts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christina Lamb</span> British journalist and author

Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.

Con Coughlin is a British journalist and author, currently The Daily Telegraph defence editor.

Benjamin C. Wedeman is an American journalist and war correspondent. He is a CNN senior international correspondent based in Rome. He has been with the network since 1994, and has earned multiple Emmy Awards and Edward Murrow Awards for team reporting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nick Paton Walsh</span> British journalist (born 1977)

Nick Paton Walsh is a British journalist who is CNN's International Security Editor. He has been CNN's Kabul Correspondent, an Asia and foreign affairs correspondent for the UK's Channel 4 News, and Moscow correspondent for The Guardian newspaper.

Joel Graham Brinkley was an American syndicated columnist. He taught in the journalism program at Stanford University from 2006 until 2013, after a 23-year career with The New York Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and was twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Andrew Machell Wilson is a former Sky News presenter. He was based at Sky News Centre in West London. Since his live reporting of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he has extensive international reporting experience, having covered almost every major conflict around the world, from Kuwait to Bosnia, and from Haiti to Chechnya. He was a correspondent for TV-am in Hong Kong and Johannesburg, and at Sky News was a correspondent in Moscow, Jerusalem and Washington, winning international awards for his coverage from all three postings. Between 2007 and 2016, he regularly presented the channel's early evening coverage from 5pm to 7pm on Friday to Sunday.

David Chater is a British broadcast journalist. Chater has more than 35 years' experience in international television news, having worked for Independent Television News, Sky News and Al Jazeera English. He joined ITN in 1976, Sky News in 1993 and Al Jazeera English in 2006. In 2008 he also took time out to serve as Head of News at Georgian television channel Kanal Pik, run under licence by K1.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jon Steele</span> American expat author living in Europe

Jon Steele is an American expat author living in Europe.

<i>The Electronic Intifada</i> Online pro-Palestinian news publication

The Electronic Intifada (EI) is an online Chicago-based publication covering the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. It describes itself as not-for-profit, independent, and providing a Palestinian perspective.

Charles Enderlin is a French-Israeli journalist, specialising in the Middle East and Israel. He is the author of a number of books on the subject, including Shamir, une biographie (1991), Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995–2002 (2002), and The Lost Years: Radical Islam, Intifada and Wars in the Middle East 2001–2006 (2007). He was awarded France's highest decoration, the Légion d'honneur, in August 2009.

Michael Douglas Deane, known as "Mick", was a British journalist and cameraman who worked for ITN, CNN, and SkyNews. Deane was killed by sniper fire while covering the Rabaa massacre in Cairo, Egypt, which the Committee to Protect Journalists said was Egypt's most violent day against journalists and which Human Rights Watch called Egypt's bloodiest day.

Atia Abawi is an American author, DEI speaker and television journalist. While working as a foreign correspondent, she was based in Kabul, Afghanistan, for almost five years. Her first book, the critically acclaimed The Secret Sky: A Novel of Forbidden Love in Afghanistan was published by Penguin Random House in September 2014. Abawi is known for her strong support for female empowerment in both her writing and reporting. She is fluent in Dari and is a graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah Haynes</span> British journalist

Deborah Haynes is a British journalist, security and defence editor at Sky News. She was previously known for her work as defence editor for The Times as well as documenting the dangers Iraqi interpreters faced since British troops withdrew from Iraq.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trey Yingst</span> American journalist (born 1993)

Trey Yingst is an American journalist who serves as a foreign correspondent for Fox News based in Jerusalem, Israel. Yingst has reported from the Gaza Strip and around the Middle East, appearing on Fox News programs.

Hugh David Scott Greenway is an American journalist who has worked as a foreign affairs correspondent for Time Life, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. Greenway has covered conflicts in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Burma, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Bosnia, and Croatia. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the Columbia Journalism Review, and la Repubblica. Greenway is currently a columnist for Foreign Affairs and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

References

  1. "CNN hires Sam Kiley from Sky News for key international role". CNN. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  2. Biography – Sam Kiley Archived 17 May 2013 at the Wayback Machine Sky News Biography – Sam Kiley. Retrieved 8 April 2013.
  3. Sky News Makes Key Foreign Appointments Archived 13 August 2014 at the Wayback Machine Sky Press Office. Created: 12 September 2012. Retrieved 8 April 2013.
  4. Biography – Sam Kiley Archived 30 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine Sky News Press Office. Retrieved 8 April 2013.
  5. "CNN hires Sam Kiley from Sky News for key international role". CNN. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  6. Eastbourne College – Former Pupils Guide to Independent Schools. Retrieved 27 November 2011
  7. "LMH, Oxford – Prominent Alumni" . Retrieved 20 May 2015.
  8. Dennis Sewell, New Statesman, 14 January 2002.
  9. Sam Kiley: Journalist and Broadcaster Kiley.biz. Retrieved 28 November 2011.
  10. Sky News cameraman Mick Deane shot and killed in Egypt BBC News. Retrieved 14 August 2013.
  11. The British Army in Afghanistan: Theirs not to reason why The Economist. 1 October 2009. Retrieved 28 November 2011.
  12. "Sam Kiley". IMDb. Retrieved 21 February 2018.