Barbara Plett Usher
UK journalist
Barbara Plett Usher (born 1967) is a Canadian-born UK journalist with experience in the Middle East and the UN. She has worked for the BBC in Jerusalem, Islamabad and the United Nations.
Between 2021 and 2024 she was the BBC's State Department correspondent, based in Washington, D.C., USA. Since 2024 she has been the BBC's Africa Editor, based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Early life and education
Plett Usher was born in Manitoba, Canada, in 1967.
She graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in journalism.
Career
She joined the BBC as a freelancer from Cairo in 1995 and became its Middle East correspondent by 2000.
She then went on to cover the death of the Syrian President Hafez al-Assad in 2000 and to do much reporting under siege in Ramallah in 2002. Her career took her to Iraq in 2003.
Plett Usher worked as BBC correspondent in Jerusalem before being transferred to Islamabad in 2009. She was the BBC's United Nations correspondent since at least 2012.
During the BBC programme From Our Own Correspondent broadcast on 30 September 2004, Plett Usher said she cried when she saw Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat being taken to hospital during his terminal illness.
“Barbara Plett Usher” enters the record as uK journalist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Barbara, Plett and Usher can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Barbara Plett Usher” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Barbara, Plett and Usher provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19650481. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 2021, 2024 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara Plett Usher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.