Girls on the Bus: Meet the Women of NBC News
The cameras have stopped rolling in the Des Moines café that Andrea Mitchell has turned into the headquarters of Andrea Mitchell Reports this weekend, freeing the veteran journalist to remove her microphone.
To no one in particular, Mitchell muses: “Can I do a show just with women?”
“Yes, you can!” insists Amy Walter, a political analyst whom Mitchell has invited on set. “You have the power to make that happen.”
Mitchell smiles. Depending on your measurement, she’s already done it.
THE A-TEAM
Mitchell joined NBC News in 1978, one of the first women to break into broadcast journalism. And however quietly, she’s set a precedent that the network seems eager to follow.
Overwhelmingly, the reporters on the trail for NBC in 2016 are women. Andrea Mitchell, Chris Jansing, Kelly O'Donnell, Kristen Welker, Katy Tur, Kasie Hunt, and Hallie Jackson have all hit the road this season, tracking down presidential candidates all across the United States. As they file stories from breweries in Des Moines and diners in New Hampshire and thousands-strong rallies all over America, their very existence dispels the myth of “the Boys on the Bus.”
Mitchell is thrilled. This is her crusade. She wants to see women on television and in boardrooms and in elected office. But make no mistake: It’s not a movement that motivates the network. Chuck Todd, political director for NBC News, stresses that there was no unilateral push to put women on the trail. “These are the best correspondents that we have, that I trust, and that others trust to get the job done,” he said on the makeshift set of Meet the Press in Des Moines last week. “I don’t want anyone to think, ‘Oh, he’s just saying that. It’s true. These women are there because they are just the best team to put on politics.”
“It wasn’t by design,” says Katy Tur, who has been covering Donald Trump since June. Anyway, she doesn’t think of it that way. The story of her gender and of being “a woman on the trail” has never much compelled her. She is a journalist. She has work to do.
Hallie Jackson, the newest member of what NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander has termed “the A-team,” echoes Tur. She doesn’t have time to dwell on the optics of her position. It’s too exhausting. “Day to day, I don’t think about it,” she explains. But every now and then, she and Tur and Mitchell or Kristen Welker will all be on an email thread and someone will notice-Would you look at that! Women only. “Those are the moments,” Jackson says. “Moments like that are when you step back and you go, 'This is pretty badass.’”
The weekend of the Iowa caucuses, Mitchell makes one such moment on Andrea Mitchell Reports, zooming out to the NBC News reporters in the field. This is a common practice. Circumscribing faces into squares to fit onto one screen, the “six box” is the fastest way to tell viewers: This is where we are now. All week, Mitchell has been tossing the feed to Jackson on Ted Cruz or Welker on the Clintons. But on that Friday, she gathers them all up together: six women, squeezed into a single frame.
Among the correspondents, a screenshot of the six box made the email rounds. “For us not to have to blink an eye at a six box of six political correspondents who happen to be women-it’s very rewarding,” Jackson says. Family and friends noticed, too. “My aunt used to work in journalism,” says Kasie Hunt, who follows Bernie Sanders. “She wrote, and she’s right, 'There’s a lot of women who worked really, really hard to make that seem normal.’”
“The longer I’ve been doing this, the less of an issue [gender] becomes,” Hunt says. But she knows that it’s because of women like “Andrea and Martha Raddatz and Ann Compton” that she doesn’t have to “fight to be let into a room.”
THE PROBLEM WITH WOMEN’S VOICES
“I think we really have moved forward lately,” Mitchell says, brushing off the avalanche of compliments from her coworkers and proteges that I recite for her. “When I was starting out, my mentors were men because there were no women,” she explains. She is still close to her few female peers from that period, but her rise through the ranks was “lonely.” There was no woman to look up to, Mitchell recalls. There was no one to tell you, “Yes, I know it’s unfair.”
“I’ve been passed over for more jobs than I can remember,” she says. “But really, it’s the first job that’s the hardest, because I couldn’t get hired.” After graduation, Mitchell earned a spot in a training program at a local broadcast station in Philadelphia. Thrilled, she told her recruiters that she wanted to work in the newsroom. “They said, 'Oh, but you can’t. We’ll let you do public relations or advertising-maybe sales,’” Mitchell says. She dropped out of the program before she even started: “I said, 'Give me an entry-level position.’” And they did-“copy boy.”
“Funny, right?” she says, smiling. It was her job to rip out the news as it came into the newsroom and hand it to the men in charge. It went on like that for a while. Even when she finally scored a position in the White House press corps, she knew where she stood. “It was men only,” Mitchell says. “I was the backup to the backup.”
Expected to be at least “amiable,” if not outright deferential, both Mitchell and Chris Jansing remember how hard it was to be seen and heard in that pivotal era. When Jansing applied for a position at a prominent local radio station in her early twenties, her interviewer let her know that she’d met all the requirements and passed all the tests but that he still couldn’t give her the job.
“I just have this problem with women’s voices,” he explained. “They don’t have enough gravitas.” When the story is recounted to Mitchell later, she can’t help herself. It’s been decades and even so: “Chris Jansing has a fabulous voice,” she bristles.
No matter her timbre, Jansing was furious. “Nobody would ever tell you that now,” she says. They wouldn’t dare-or risk the lawsuit. But at the time, it was as good of a reason as any to count someone out for a job. A few years later, Jansing applied for a promotion at the radio station where she worked only to be told by the news director that while she “really deserved it,” she wouldn’t get the position. “Jim has a family,” the news director explained, gesturing toward her coworker. “He needs the money. And I think it’s going to go to him.” Jansing didn’t swallow her disappointment. She quit on the spot. “I hope to God we’re at the point where you don’t have to leave your job to get people to pay attention.”
Such boldness notwithstanding, Jansing acknowledges that “confidence became an issue in a very real way, very early on.” She remembers being on the brink of an “amazing” exposé at the beginning of her career. Dutifully, she phoned the compromised public official for his statement, who told her not only that she was wrong, but that if she reported it, he’d take her down. Jansing retreated, but when the case went to trial, the truth came out. She’d had the facts exactly right.
“I think there was a bit of inner concern that as a woman, I wouldn’t be taken seriously,” she says. It was Mitchell who shook that out of her.
THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING REPORTERS
By then a seasoned pro, Jansing signed on to NBC News in 1998. She was promptly dispatched to shoot one of her first live segments at Hillary Clinton’s kick-off rally in 1999. The former First Lady was running for Senate.
Until then, Jansing had been a general assignment reporter in Albany for WNYT. And as Jansing tells it, “No one had come from a market that small to the network-ever.” To complicate matters, producers planned to have her cover most of the event without a script. She’d never done it before. “I think it’s fair to say I was terrified,” she remembers. Stationed in Purchase, New York, for the announcement, Jansing spotted Andrea Mitchell walking toward her. Mitchell introduced herself (“As if I didn’t know!”) and told Jansing she was on hand to help, if she needed anything. “I know a lot of people here,” Mitchell added. Jansing was “flabbergasted.”
“I immediately wanted to bow down,” Jansing says. “She’s Andrea Mitchell!” Years later, she thanked Mitchell for the gesture. “I said to Andrea, 'You don’t know what that meant to me. Why did you do it?’” Mitchell told her that she’d watched her tapes and had been impressed. “And,” she added, “I know what it’s like trying to make it as a woman in a man’s field.”
“Contrary to the old fiction, women tend to want to help each other,” Mitchell says. “I’ve worked side-by-side with some of the toughest, smartest women from other networks. Somehow, when we’re on the road together, it’s just more fun.” Mitchell summons up an illustrative anecdote: She and a few of her fellow female journalists happened to be booked on the same military transport, traveling from Iraq to Brussels for the NATO summit. “That’s a long, long flight, and it’s stressful. We knew we’d all be on deadline the minute we landed,” Mitchell says. “But you can’t do much on that kind of aircraft. So, we’re sitting in these canvas seats. We’ve all got life jackets on, and you can’t hear because of the noise. And who knows who started it, but at one point someone passed this hand lotion up and down the row. There were so many more women than men on that plane, just passing hand lotion to each other in silence.”
She has come to not only expect, but depend on that kind of solidarity between women. In August 2011, Mitchell was scheduled to fly to Des Moines to cover the Iowa Straw Poll. Only days before the trip, she had gone in for a routine mammogram and discovered she had breast cancer. “Of course,” she would not cancel the trip. She would shoot Andrea Mitchell Reports from Java Joe’s, as planned, and contend with the doctors later. Besides, she had already invited a congresswoman-a breast cancer survivor, as it happened-to be on the show.
“I was just scared to death,” Mitchell says. “I was terrified. And this congresswoman said to me, during a commercial break, 'What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’ And I just mouthed the words to her: 'I’m in trouble.’ She took my hand. She knew what I meant-without even asking.” The congresswoman recommended a few of her own doctors and laid out her options. Mitchell went to get treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering two weeks later, missing the NBC Debate at the Reagan Library. “The people I work with and for were so wonderful,” Mitchell says from her perch in the coffee shop. “Just being back here and sitting here, it gets to me.”
Even in less dire circumstances, “there is a common experience to being a woman in this business,” Hunt explains. Every once in awhile, “the boys’ club can feel very real.” Kelly O'Donnell, lead Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC, knows it well. Especially when she got her start, there were people who didn’t “take you seriously, because you were a woman. There were people who may not have wanted to talk to you as much.” And even now, she’s seen men cultivate sources by “being able to sort of 'talk with the guys’ or talk about sports.”
To counteract it, the women in and out of the network do what they can to root for each other. “I really have tremendous camaraderie with the women that I have worked with,” O'Donnell says. “We’re peers in every way-Dana Bash, Nancy Cordes, Brianna Keilar, Kristen Welker, Andrea Mitchell, of course. We have been sisters on the trail for many different campaigns. Often when you’re out there, you become very close to people who you’re competing against. And I think as a woman in the field, while we’re fiercely competitive, we’ve also had these real, genuine friendships that have endured through the highs and lows of the political landscape.”
O'Donnell likes to tell people that women are “the first there and the last to leave” during election season. “You will see a very busy press section of an event, and as the day wears on,” she explains, fewer and fewer people stick around. “There have been many times when Dana Bash, Nancy Codes, and me would be looking over to each other. We’d be the final three, always standing on some kind of apple crate or equipment case to get us tall enough for the shot behind us. My life on a box-it’s been a big part of this experience.”
Back in D.C., Welker and Jackson live in the same apartment complex, which means they’re in the same place at the same time, oh, about every six months. During a particular rapid-fire exchange of emails last year, Welker insisted that they get together IRL. “I’m like, 'Come on down!’” Jackson remembers. Until the weekend of the Iowa caucuses, they hadn’t overlapped at all since. Bundled up in Des Moines, they clinked glasses and toasted the season. “We were like, 'It’s finally happening.’”
Welker and Jansing see more of each other. When Jansing joined the NBC team at the White House, Welker was already a three-year veteran of the presidential press corps. “We clicked immediately.” Welker says. “We’ve allowed each other to have our own spaces in the White House. And at the same time, we’re very supportive of each other.” But when Welker is in a bind, it’s Mitchell who is her personal phone-a-friend. “She’s always there. I’m so impressed by the extent to which she’s this icon, this pathfinder.”
“And yet she always takes time to help those of us who are newer at this than she is,” Welker continues. “She’s the hardest working journalist and the most generous.” And Welker would know. She and Mitchell have covered Hillary Clinton together since the former secretary of state announced her historic presidential bid in April 2015. The collaboration has been more than a privilege: “It is the honor of my life, to be able to do that.”
ALWAYS CARRY ON
But for all the excitement and glory, this job is a heartbreaker. It demands abrupt goodbyes and hasty exits. It’s always canceling plans. Tur knew this already, of course. She used to be a literal storm chaser for the Weather Channel. She is a seven-year veteran of NBC News. And yet she understands it better now. In November 2014, Tur moved to London to cover international news for the network. She was on her first trip back to New York in June 2015 when producers dispatched her to cover a few events that Donald Trump was hosting to publicize his no-shot presidential campaign. “Fine,” Tur remembers. She went. Less than a week later, “a little birdie” phoned to put her on notice. A friend of hers in the office had heard the news and wanted her to let her know: “Hey, by the way, they’re putting you on Trump.” NBC News President Deborah Turness made it official a few hours later. Tur packed up the sundresses and t-shirts she’d brought on her “vacation” and set out for New Hampshire. Meanwhile, the presidential bid that was supposed to be a colossal stunt has since morphed into a formidable operation. Tur has been there ever since.
It wasn’t until she went back to London for the first time in four months that she realized the extent to which she’d been upended. “That was difficult,” Tur concedes, adding that she’s now been on the road for almost as long as she lived in London. “I walked into my apartment and I started crying,” she remembers. “I was just bawling at my kitchen table, thinking, 'I miss my couch. I miss my friends. I miss sleep. I miss my kitchen. I really miss my kitchen.’”
This work requires more sacrifice than most would be willing to endure. Tur has only slept on her own sheets about a dozen times since June. Jansing boasts that she has become “one of the world’s greatest packers” on the trail. She has invested in comfortable separates. She rolls her clothes to utilize every last inch of space. She always carries-on. “Once and only once,” she was convinced to check her luggage. Inevitably, the bag was lost. And worse still, “inside of it-and this is 15 years later and I might cry-was my favorite pair of shoes.” For Jansing, the wound is fresh: “I’ll just say that they were incredibly comfortable and incredibly hot.” The loss only deepened Jansing’s conviction: One, good shoes are rare and special. Two, never let someone else do a job you could do better yourself.
Meanwhile, Peter Alexander misses his kids. Hallie Jackson mourns time to read for pleasure. She has established a routine as best she can. But it’s hard. To cope, Jackson decants her preferred shampoo and conditioner into small bottles to fit in her suitcase. When you’re on the road for three weeks at a time, “it can very quickly start to feel like Groundhog Day. It’s disorienting.” she says. “I’ve made it a point to carry that stuff with me [to] make it feel the tiniest bit more like home.” Even the patron saint of the business is not immune from the pressures of this existence. Pointing to her wrist, Mitchell tells me that her producers gave her a fitness tracker for Christmas-part present, part command.
“I thought it would be a great way to track my sleep, because we all agree I’m not getting enough,” Mitchell explains. Except, she continues, her problem isn’t that she can’t calculate the hours: “For a while, my average was three hours of sleep [per night], which is crazy and really disabling.”
THE RABBI AND THE WELK-NADO
Like all the NBC correspondents, Mitchell, too, writes and approves her own segments. She tries to finish her scripts for Andrea Mitchell Reports and the Today Show by around midnight. But sometimes, she has to get up three or four hours later to get to the studio. “And it takes time to get your makeup off and on,” she adds.
For Welker, it’s a full-time job. “I get so paranoid about the makeup build-up,” Welker says, copping to a fairly serious addiction to Neutrogena Makeup Removing Cleansing Towelettes. She runs through four per day. “I really feel like it takes that many to just get it all off,” she insists. Welker was never as meticulous about eyeliner and mascara and lipstick, but she’s learned to pay better attention to makeup artists over the years. “I mean that was an education in and of itself,” she says. “My big challenge, I will say, is contouring. God help us all with contouring.”
Peter Alexander, who shares a minuscule office at the White House with Jansing and Welker, laughs. When they’re all racing to get into the field, it’s “like sisters fighting for the bathroom.” Alexander is fixing his tie and Welker is doing her makeup and “it looks like we’re getting ready for prom.”
But Alexander leans forward and focuses in when he talks about her talents. He thinks of his daughters, who see Andrea Mitchell when they visit NBC News HQ and play with Welker and watch him do his job around women. “My teammates are women,” Alexander asserts. “I take so much pride in that.” He has christened them accordingly. Mitchell is “the Rabbi,” a spiritual and intellectual leader. Welker is “the Welk-nado,” which Alexander chalks up to the fact that she’s “a tornado of energy anywhere she goes.”
“Peter and I have spent a lot of hours in the White House together just the two of us” Welker says. By her own admission, Welker would race into the office, bearing a coffee in one hand (for her), a hot chocolate in the other (for Alexander-“lite whipped cream”), and maybe several totes. She would throw her coat at a hook, log onto her computer, and “dive into the day.” Stunned, she explains, Alexander would “just sort of sit” and wait for the dust to settle.
“She sweeps through the room, doesn’t stop, doesn’t pause. She’s relentless,” he says. It is a nickname she is proud to have made her own.
Welker says she owes her ambition to her mother, recalling how hard it was for Julie Welker, a black woman in the 1970s, to get a job. Almost 50 years later, Welker is an exception as well. It is still too rare to see a black woman on air.
“When I first went to the White House, candidly, that pressure that I felt [was] immense.” She pauses: “I was very aware of it, let’s put it that way.”
For Welker, it’s since gotten easier, but sometimes she’ll look around at her peers and see that she’s the only black woman in her row. She’ll look behind her. No-she’s the only black woman in the room. So, she keeps moving and meeting young women and showing them that there is space for them on television. She promises.
A FRONT-ROW TICKET TO HISTORY
The pace of it thrills her. Like Tur and Jansing, she’s crazy about it. They all are.
Jansing grew up in Ohio-one of 12 children. Her mother dropped out of nursing school to support them. “[She was] married to a man who had a ninth-grade education,” Jansing says. She shrugs her shoulders: What else was she going to do? And yet, she says, her parents made it obvious to her that they “believed in the power of education, the power of knowledge, the power of reading, and gave that to me.”
“[They] wanted me to believe that even though maybe they didn’t fulfill everything they could have or wanted to, that’s what they wanted for their children. And ultimately that’s what this election is about. It’s what every election is about. How do we make the world a better place for our kids, for our grandchildren? My parents did that for me. I feel like my job is to give people the information so that they can make smart decisions.”
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Tur says. She is convinced there is no candidate more exciting to follow than Donald Trump. And she gets to tell his story: “I can go toe-to-toe with him. He can yell and scream and do what he need to do, and it’s not going to intimidate me. It’s just not.”
“It feels like a cliche to say so, but I have a front-row ticket to history,” she says. Whether Trump wins or loses, she adds, “[This election] is going to go down in the history books. Hopefully, they’ll mention our names.”
