Cathy Newman

Cathy Newman is a multi-award-winning broadcaster and writer who spent 20 years on Channel 4 News, before joining Sky News in April 2026. She hosts a nightly politics show as well as presenting investigations, documentaries and a weekly podcast.

Cathy became Channel 4 News’ first female main anchor, broadcasting a string of scoops, including an eight year investigation unmasking the most prolific abuser in the Church of England, barrister John Smyth. That led to the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby being forced out of office for the first time in history.

Cathy was named Network Journalist of the Year by the Royal Television Society in March 2025. She also received the RTS award for interview of the year for her exclusive sit-down with Welby. The same year, she was named Journalist of the Year & Interviewer of the Year at the British Journalism Awards; Broadcast Journalist of the Year by the Society of Editors; Woman of the Year by Women in Journalism and she also won TV News Story of the Year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards.

Previously she broadcast sexual harassment allegations against the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Rennard, and an investigation into a British sex offender, Simon Harris, which saw him jailed for 17 years. Cathy was the only broadcast journalist to travel with Angelina Jolie and the foreign secretary William Hague to the Congo as part of a campaign against sexual violence. Her studio interviews are frequently news-making, and many have gone viral – watched by millions online – including combative encounters with the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson and the former motor-racing tycoon Max Mosley. The latter was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award in 2019, and made the front cover of Private Eye.

In April 2020 she was named as one of the launch presenters for the new Times Radio station, presenting the Friday Drive Time show. Her interview – in which Isabel Oakeshott abruptly hung up on her – was nominated for Radio Times Moment of the Year in the Radio academy Arias awards. In April 2022 she added the role of Investigations Editor to her Channel 4 brief. She also writes frequently for national newspapers including The Daily Mail, The Times and Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent.

She presents other Channel 4 programmes including the Alternative Election Night with Jeremy Paxman. She regularly presents Channel 4’s Dispatches programmes and has appeared several times on Have I Got News For You and Christmas Celebrity Genius. Prior to arriving at Channel 4 News, Cathy spent a decade on newspapers. She was chief political correspondent of the Financial Times for three years. Before that she covered politics and media for the FT. Cathy joined the FT from the Independent where she was media business correspondent.

In 2000, Cathy won the prestigious Laurence Stern Fellowship, spending four months following in the footsteps of Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post. Her first best-selling book – Bloody Brilliant Women: Pioneers, Revolutionaries & Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention – about female pioneers in 20th century Britain, was published by HarperCollins in Autumn 2018. Cathy was described by the Observer as a “brilliant writer”. Author Michael Morpurgo said: “This book is so important. No library, no school or university, should be without a copy.”

Her second book, It Takes Two: A History of the Couples Who Dared To Be Different, was published on October 15, 2020 by HarperCollins. Her third book, The Ladder, based on her weekly Times Radio interviews with leading women, was published in February 2024, again by HarperCollins.

Cathy was a judge on the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015 and the Red Magazine Women of the Year Award 2016. She is a patron of Kids, a charity for disabled children, and an ambassador for both Young Minds and Music For All.

In her spare time, Cathy is a keen amateur violinist, and plays in The Statutory Instruments quartet with members of parliament and Westminster staff. She is married to John O’Connell, a writer, and they have two children.