PBS NewsHour has been committed to being one of the most trusted daily news programs for nearly 50 years. The previous host, Judy Woodruff, recently stepped away from the desk to focus on special reports, with Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett becoming the new faces of the weeknight program on January 2nd. They come to PBS NewsHour with decades of experience in journalism and recently joined Sara Just, the show’s Senior Executive Producer, for a TCA press conference that allowed their own individual personalities to shine.
(Rahoul Ghose/PBS)
“I was Amna’s fan long before I was her friend,” Geoff Bennett said of his co-host on the show. “She is the personification of grace and grit. And if you look at any one of the interviews she’s done over the past two weeks, you will understand why I say that. It is really a professional privilege to get to sit next to [her] night after night.” Geoff and Amna relate to each other on a personal level, both being parents and journalists and having similar taste in music, specifically the 1980s pop variety.
“I had been watching Geoff,” Amna Nawaz reciprocated the compliment, both of them having peers at NBC News. “I knew how incredibly well respected he is as a journalist. And when I started asking around to other folks, I also saw how incredibly adored he is just as a human being, as a colleague, and as a teammate. It’s something essential to the work that we do. And we’ve gotten to know each other a lot better… I’m just so, so grateful and privileged to be able to partner with Geoff in this way.”
“I do think it comes through the screen when people working next to each other like each other, respect each other,” Sara Just commented on the dynamic between Amna and Geoff, likening it to the unmistakable bond viewers felt from original PBS NewsHour hosts Robin MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. “This kind of decision-making process happens slowly over a long time and then kind of all at once. And so knowing them, admiring them as journalists for so long, working with them, and working with my colleagues at WETA and Sharon Rockefeller, we all felt within the system that this was a pair that would make sense. But it was really when we finally started getting together, the three of us, that I realized oh, this is a chemistry that can work. And it's a remarkable thing.” Sara also described the obvious sense of trust that Amna and Geoff have in each other as helping the audiences trust them and the stories they’re telling.
“My job is not to tell people what to think, what they should think about anything, but it is to make them want to think about these topics, and I think we’ve had a lot of conversations around bias and objectivity and neutrality and all these kind of phrases in journalism,” Amna shared about the show’s commitment to neutral reporting. “My bar is fairness and fidelity to the facts. So if the questions that I’m asking are based on facts, if I feel I’m being fair in the interview with someone in the position of power, if I’m treating someone’s story out in the field with the same care and attention that I would want my own story treated if it were being told, that, to me, is my bar. And I think we set daily reminders for ourselves in all of these things. I have that as one of my daily questions I ask myself is am I being fair? And that’s the standard I work with.”
“Even though we are both co-anchors of this program, we are, at our heart, reporters and journalists,” Geoff added. “One of the ways, especially in terms of politics and checking bias, is to do more reporting and to talk to as many people as you possibly can, informed sources about whatever that topic is. But, ultimately, we are dedicated truthtellers, and our goal, and this is true, this is what Robin and Jim created, was this program where, at the end of the day, you get the clearest, most comprehensive distillation of the facts and the news of the day, and that was such a gift what they established some fifty years ago, because that is the bar by which we judge all of our work, and that doesn’t happen everywhere, but it does here at the NewsHour. So I’m deeply grateful for that.”
While the role of a journalist and news host is to remain impartial, having them in the position of an interviewee gave them both the chance to let their individual personalities shine. “Like many news organizations, we start our day with our editorial meeting,” Amna explained. “Geoff and I both have young kids, so our days start much earlier than that. A lot of lunch-packing, getting them out the door to school. But in terms of the show, we have a rigorous editorial meeting first thing in the morning, and then the day kind of flows from there. We’re basically on a sprint from those early emails, texts, and meetings to that live show at 6:00. Geoff and I both do tapings occasionally in the afternoon as well, and then 6:00 to 7:00 we’re live, every day. It’s a standing meeting we have every day, an appointment with the American public. And depending on the day, depending on how late news breaks, some days are easier or harder than others.”
“As I often joke with Amna, I knew from a very early age I wanted to be a journalist, and I have no other employable skills,” laughed Geoff Bennett. “I had the benefit of growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia TV market, that news market, is one of the strongest in the country. So watching Lisa Thomas-Laury and Jim Gardner, and then sticking through for Peter Jennings, and watching Carole Simpson on the weekends, reading the papers during the day, and watching those broadcasts at night, that was how I got journalism in my DNA. And my first job, my first professional job in journalism, was being Carole Simpson's intern. It was at an NABJ conference. The talent development coordinator was a Spelman grad. I'd gone to Morehouse. And I told her I wanted to work in journalism, didn't know how to do it. My parents weren't educators. I had no real path. And she said, well, you've come to the right place. And that internship is basically what put me on the path to get me to where I am today. And Carole Simpson really pouring into me and taking me under her wing and mentoring me has just been unmatched.”
“My exposure to journalism began very early,” Amna Nawaz shared. “My parents are originally from Pakistan, and my father used to anchor the English language news in Pakistan as a young man. He changed careers later. Journalism was not necessarily something we were pushed to in my family. I was supposed to be on a one-year layover, sort of doing an internship at ABC News at Nightline in Washington, where Sara Just was a senior producer, where she and I first met. And that began in August of 2001. And within weeks, the world had changed. And my place as a brown, Muslim, first-generation American woman, my place in the world had changed, as well. I just saw how incredibly important it was for journalists to do their jobs in that moment, in that fear, in that uncertainty. I saw how many people turned on their TVs, just to figure out what was going on. I couldn't see myself doing anything else, and I've been doing it ever since.”
There are many benefits to a show like PBS NewsHour, which delivers all of the news you need to know as an informed citizen of the world and presentes it in both a digestible hour-long broadcast and bite-sized shorts online. “It's been eight years for me now since I went from commercial to broadcast, and Amna and Geoff have also worked in commercial and broadcast,” Sara Just revealed about the difference of working for an organization like ABC News and working in public television. “We appreciate the challenges and differences all the time. Our evening news program is 56 minutes of television uninterrupted by commercials. That's three times as long almost as the evening news broadcasts that we compete with on the commercial networks. So we have the time. And we do know in today's media landscape, people aren't really tuning in like they did in the days of Jim Lehrer and Robin MacNeil, Walter Cronkite, not knowing what happened today. People mostly do know. Your headlines are coming to you at every which device they could. So we want to tell them what's important about what happened today, why it happened, what the impact on their lives are gonna be. So then, we also have the room in those 56 minutes to tell people stories they may not have heard somewhere else. I like to think of NewsHour as a daily news program and a news magazine combined. And that's really one of the big differences.”
You can experience the difference of PBS NewsHour for yourself every day at 6:00 pm ET on your local PBS station or by visiting pbs.org/newshour.