Sophy Ridge

Sophy Ridge

Sophy Ridge (born 1984) is an English broadcast journalist, who is the Sky News Senior Political Correspondent.^[1]

She was educated at Tiffin Girls School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where she read English Literature. She has written about reading English at St Edmund Hall on the Oxford University website.^[2]

From October 2016, Ridge will present Sky News Tonight on Fridays. She will also present from 2 pm to 5 pm on Saturdays, and from midday to 2 pm on Sundays.^[3]

Career

After her graduation, Ridge was a trainee at the News of the World newspaper.

Subsequently, she gained a job as a journalist on Sky News in 2011, replacing Niall Paterson. During her time there she covered a broad range of political stories and has travelled with the Prime Minister to Afghanistan, New York, and Brazil. She was based in Colorado for the channel's coverage of the US elections and is known for her round the clock broadcasting at the annual party conferences.

Ridge has won several journalism awards, including the MHP 30 Under 30 Gold Award, the Headline Money rising star award, top-rated female political blogger in the Total Politics Blog Awards 2011 with her Waste Watch blogging website, and was short-listed as Young Journalist of the Year in the Royal Television Society Awards in 2013.

She is currently a Sky News Political correspondent based at Westminster. Her biggest and most important role came in 2015 as she played a key role in helping with the 2015 general election coverage for the Sky, reporting on Labour Party's campaign and conducting interviews with party members, she also contributed news articles to the Sky News website.

In an interview in the Daily Express in May 2015, Ridge commented: "As a political journalist, this is what we have been building up to for the last five years. The General Election is like our World Cup. I know it makes me sound like some kind of strange political geek, but I am really excited to work this election, which is my first as a broadcast journalist. It has meant working weekends and not getting many days off, but I am happy to give up my life for a bit. I will be in Doncaster on election night. After most elections, everyone just wants to lie in a darkened room and recover for a while, but this time around the post-election period could be the busiest time. This time around I have been following Labour Party, so I have basically gone wherever the party has gone, following Miliband around. I was keen to do Labour because I think the big story is Ed Miliband, and whether he is going to succeed or fail in challenging David Cameron."^[4]

Political views

Ridge claims that the U.S. public's rejection of Hillary Clinton in the United States presidential election, 2016, is due to sexism. She states: "To put it bluntly: women can be sexist too... There are plenty of women who think mothers should stay at home to raise a family, believe girls wear pink and play with dolls and secretly would feel a little bit safer if they knew a man was flying their plane." She adds: "Sexism is insidious, unconscious and affects women as well as men. Just because women didn't turn out in big enough numbers for Mrs Clinton does not mean we should dismiss the troubling sexism and misogyny that marred the campaign... The fact so many women in America voted for Mr Trump over Mrs Clinton is a get-out-of-jail-free card: female voters weren't bothered, so it can't be sexist. It can, and it is."^[5]

References