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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The host of PBS's "Washington Week in Review" and correspondent for "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" is a fan of civil conversation, good writing and the Washington Mystics.
Dec 18, 2000 | Gwen Ifill reminds me of Walt "Clyde" Frazier, the legendary basketball star and ex-New York Knick. Like Frazier, Ifill, the 44-year-old senior correspondent at "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and host of "Washington Week in Review," maintains an external sense of cool and serenity, while underneath lie serious smarts, smooth execution and a healthy dose of skepticism -- all qualities that make Ifill a natural to moderate "Washington Week," the 33-year-old TV talk show. If the higher-ups at PBS thought that removing the program's previous moderator, Ken Bode, would give them a political shoutfest, they were wrong.
After attending Simmons College, an all-women's school in Boston, Ifill was hired by the Boston Herald in 1977. It was a gig that put her, an African-American, into the fire, as she arrived during that city's notorious busing crisis. After leaving the Herald and covering Maryland politics for the Baltimore Sun (along with New York Times writer and "Washington Week" regular Richard Berke), Ifill joined the staff of the Washington Post. During her seven-year stint at the Post, she began to appear on "Washington Week" as a panelist. After leaving the Post in 1991, Ifill became a congressional correspondent and covered the White House for the New York Times.
She was wooed by numerous networks, and finally came to terms with NBC in 1994. Her charge there included on-air reportage, covering the White House, Capitol Hill and presidential campaigns. Ifill spent five years with the network; the Public Broadcasting Service approached her with job offers twice during that period. She was first courted for the "Washington Week" job months before accepting it. According to sources, Ifill was irked at PBS's treatment of Bode, who was ousted after refusing to turn "Washington Week" into a version of "The McLaughlin Group." But after PBS added the prestigious job of senior correspondent along with Jim Lehrer to the package, she and her agent, with some help from "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert, negotiated an out clause to her agreement with NBC, and Ifill became an employee of PBS.
Since joining the "NewsHour" and "Washington Week," Ifill has become a major media star. She recently spoke with me from her Virginia office.
There's a certain serenity that comes across during your broadcasts. You rarely seem to get ruffled.
I guess people who know me can tell when I'm ruffled. You know what it is? I honestly believe that bad news will find you and the good news doesn't, so you have to focus on what's good in your life and work -- take it a step at a time.
The only time I was nervous on television was at NBC when I had to do live shots for the "NBC Nightly News," covering the White House. I can't explain why, but there was something about it that made me conscious that millions of people were watching. I'm usually smart enough to figure it out, that it's not brain surgery and it's not the most important thing in the world, and combine all those thoughts with a pretty good grasp of the subject matter. You get to be calm about it. I try not to sweat all the small stuff -- which wasn't a bad book! The little stuff I can handle.
As for having a grasp of the material, how do you acquire that knowledge considering you do relatively in-depth interviews each day at the "NewsHour"? Isn't there a danger of having only a surface grasp of complex issues?
That happens all the time in television, much more so than in print. I was a print reporter for 15 years. When you are in print, you cover a beat. You learn to immerse yourself and you know everybody involved with your beat. For instance, covering the White House was supposed to be a prestige job, but the reporters who cover it best do so by not covering the White House. They cover it by talking to people in the State Department or in Congress. You come at the story in as many ways as possible with the "NewsHour." It is fascinating, because every single day I might have a different subject that I am not an expert on. It demands that I read four or five papers a day, and have at least a cursory knowledge of everything that's going on, whether it's overthrows in the Ivory Coast or the latest tracking numbers on a campaign here. By the end of the day, you might have to speak to leading participants in the Middle East crisis or the governor of Minnesota.
Your first job was at the Boston Herald during the busing crisis of the late '70s.
The tail end of the crisis. I was only there for three years. My first writing job at the Herald was writing about food. That was the one writing job that was open. I couldn't cook, so that was the job where I figured out you could write about anything at day's end that you knew nothing about that morning. When I started covering school boards in Boston, that was my first taste of politics. It was very political in that city. It was full of colorful characters and there were literally riots going on in high schools that I didn't feel safe going to cover in person.
