Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast
from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury,
that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast
but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My cast away this week is the journalist, Gary O'Donoghue.
He's the chief North America correspondent for BBC News.
Last year, his coverage of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump conducted live as the incident unfolded,
won the Royal Television Society Breaking News Award.
His interview with an eyewitness, which was rebroadcast by every major news network,
was watched by more than 300 million people on social media and nominated for an Emmy.
Viewers were impressed by his journalistic skills
and by the fact that he was covering an event he could not actually see.
Gary is blind.
In fact, he's the first disabled person to be posted as a BBC foreign correspondent.
During his career, he's reported on mass shootings, filed stories from the Macedonian border during the Kosovo conflict,
covered the Iraq war and chronicled seven British general elections.
He was born in London, whereas dad worked as a black cab driver.