“It’s my story, I want to cover it”

News reader and foreign correspondent Carol Barnes was fighting for her life last night after suffering a massive stroke at her home in Brighton. Carol had been due to fly out to South Africa in a few days’ time. Sir David Nicholas, former head of ITN remembers an occasion when Carol insisted on following up a story even though she was not in the best condition to travel,

“I remember her covering the Brixton riots while she was still heavily pregnant”, he said. “There was another occasion when the Ayatollah Khomeini was still in exile in France, Carol was one of the reporters who covered him at his place of exile — she was heavily pregnant then too. When the Ayatollah went back to Tehran after the overthrow of the Shah, in the wild manic scenes, I sent a male reporter to cover it. Carol said: ‘ It’s my story, I want to cover it. ‘ I couldn’t send a pregnant woman to the mad streets of Tehran but I enormously admired her for that. She was afraid of flying, obviously quite a problem for a foreign correspondent, and she learnt to become a private pilot, qualified as one and conquered her fear.” link