Kathryn Gyngell

From Powerbase
Revision as of 14:07, 18 December 2009 by Tom Mills (talk | contribs) (Education and career)
Jump to: navigation, search

Kathryn Julia Gyngell (née Rowan) (born 7 April 1950), known as Kathy, is a former media researcher turned right-wing operative. She is the widow of Thatcher's favourite broadcaster Bruce Gyngell.

Education and career

Gyngell studied a degree in social anthropology from Cambridge University and an M.Phil in sociology at Oxford. [1] She subsequent worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Television Research at Leeds University [2] where she worked under the US born media academic Jay Blumler. [3]

Gyngell later worked at the Features and Current Affairs Department at LWT before being appointed a Features Editor at TV-am. [4] In 1986 she married TV-am's managing director Bruce Gyngell. [5] After the birth of their second child in the late 1980s, Gyngell left her job at TV-am to work as a full time mother. She spent several years in Australia and on her return to London co-founded the Full Time Mothers Association, to raise consciousness about motherhood as 'a skilled job for intelligent women'. [6]

During the 1990s Gyngell wrote several letters to The Times, mainly relating to parenting and 'family values'. In November 1999 she wrote a letter referring to media attacks on Jeffrey Archer and Michael Ancram and complaining that, 'sleaze seems to be real sleaze only if it can be stuck to the Conservative Party.' [7]

Notes

  1. Screengrab of Kathy Gyngell's CV. Taken from <http://www.news-watch.co.uk/gyngell.php> on 27 November 2009
  2. Kathy Gyngell & David Keighley, ‘Blair's EU-Turn: A case study in BBC partiality’, 16 September 2004; p.2
  3. A 1984 article by Blumler in Parliamentary Affairs credits Kathryn Rowan and with carrying out the research for the article - Jay G. Blumler, (1984) 'The Sound of Parliament', Parliamentary Affairs37(1) 250-266
  4. Kathy Gyngell & David Keighley, ‘Blair's EU-Turn: A case study in BBC partiality’, 16 September 2004; p.2
  5. 'The man who began to get younger at 46', Daily Mail, 25 August 1987
  6. Ros Coward, 'Women at war', Guardian, 22 March 1993; 'Working parents: how best to meet the children's needs', The Times, 7 February 1997; p.19
  7. 'Press and party as arbiters of morality in politics', The Times, 27 November 1999; p.23