It's a Matter of Facts for Judy Woodruff

When PBS NewsHour anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff was just starting her career, an NBC executive nixed her hiring, saying her delivery wasn't forceful enough, that she sounded too soft and Southern. He suggested she get a voice coach.

That was almost fifty years ago. Woodruff never took those voice lessons. She got too busy working as a reporter and news anchor for ABC, CBS, CNN, public television and, yes, NBC. Hearing her today, it's easy to imagine that her voice never changed dramatically. She proved long ago that she can be courteous and still pursue tough questions.

"I don't pull punches," Woodruff says. "There's a way of being both respectful and being direct and asking for answers at the same time. And that's how I see my approach."

Her approach — and, obviously, there's more to it than that — earned Woodruff top honors last year. At a time when more people than ever view the media with suspicion, she won the first Peabody Award for Journalistic Integrity.

"Judy is journalistic integrity personified," says Sara Just, the executive producer of NewsHour. "She believes so much in the importance of respecting the audience and their intelligence, as well as the people we're talking to and reporting on. She never loses sight of that."

Over the years, Woodruff has proved to be much more than a reliable relayer of headlines. A tireless and probing interviewer, she excels at untangling the complexities of politics and government. Early on, she hit the campaign trail with Jimmy Carter, then covered his presidency as well as Ronald Reagan's early years in the White House. She's interviewed heads of state and moderated or covered every presidential convention and election since 1976. She's also anchored special coverage of major events like 9/11, the space shuttle Columbia disaster, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing.

What makes her career even more impressive is that she forged it at a time when it was rare to see a woman anchor. Then, news departments often hired one woman reporter and one only — to cover soft features, not hard news. But Woodruff was undeterred. Even before completing her political science degree at Duke University in 1968, she began applying for jobs. Most news directors didn't respond. "But if they did," Woodruff recalls, "they said, 'We don't hire women.'"

Offered a secretary job in the news department of WQXI, an Atlanta ABC affiliate, she took it, thinking she could work her way up. Once on board, she tried to do just that, entreating the news director to let her tag along with the news crew. "His answer was always, 'Why are you interested? We already have a woman reporter.'"

Woodruff credits her parents for cultivating her self-worth, belief in hard work and willingness to take risks. An Army brat born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she got a taste of the wide world early on when her family lived in Germany and then Taiwan. After they returned to the U.S. and settled near Augusta, Georgia, she overachieved as a way to win friends. She lost a bid for vice-president of her student council, but she gained entry to the school's drama club. That paid off when she won the Augusta Junior Miss Pageant; she performed a sketch as a discarded ragdoll for the talent competition.

Her tenacity at WQXI led to an on-camera weather announcer role on Sundays; the five-minute slot ran in the 11 p.m. news report. But that wasn't what she aspired to, so when a reporter position opened at the local CBS affiliate, WAGA, she auditioned and won the job, which had her reporting on the Georgia State Legislature and anchoring noon and evening news programs.

One of her early investigative stories involved alleged discrimination at a federally subsidized apartment complex. To get to the bottom of it, she dispatched two applicants — one white and one Black — to inquire about apartments. Only the white individual was shown a unit.

After the exposé aired, Woodruff received threatening phone calls from viewers. Reporting on politics had already made her the target of positive and negative reactions, but nothing like this. The callers, she remembers, "said unimaginably ugly things and hung up the phone." She adds, "It was certainly a big part of my education."

Nonetheless, Woodruff recognized she'd landed the right beat. "I love politics. I never get tired of it. I know there are times when we think, 'Oh my gosh. This is just so depressing.' It's so demoralizing to see the kind of fighting that we have going on right now. But I keep coming back to the fact that so much is at stake," says Woodruff, who adds that sorting it all out "is endlessly fascinating. So start with that right out of the gate. I'm interested. I'm curious."

One political animal she encountered regularly was Jimmy Carter; she covered his one-term Georgia governorship and his subsequent run for the presidency. By then she was also covering the entire Southeastern U.S. for NBC, keeping her nose to the ground for vital stories. During Carter's presidential transition, for instance, she broke several exclusives regarding key appointments in his new administration. Her bosses at NBC noticed and moved her to Washington as a White House correspondent.

Woodruff quickly realized that who you know can make all the difference, so she cultivated sources at the White House and elsewhere. Her efforts led to a major scoop. During the historic Camp David Accords in 1978, when Carter brought together Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat and Israeli leader Menachem Begin to negotiate a peace treaty, she heard a rumor that the talks were failing. "Pretty much everybody was reporting that they were on the verge of collapse." Woodruff's informant, though, insisted the negotiations were progressing. Woodruff alerted NBC anchor John Chancellor, who later thanked her for saving the network from airing the same wrong analysis as the others.

"Even though that was years ago, I still feel very good about that," Woodruff says. "It was such a high-pressure environment."

Working in the White House wasn't always glamorous. There were long stakeouts and carefully orchestrated briefings that resulted in little or no real news. Once, while Woodruff was recording a standup on the White House lawn, a CBS employee listened in and told CBS's Leslie Stahl what Woodruff was reporting. Stahl took the information to CBS, which ran the item minutes before NBC did — scooping Woodruff with her own scoop.

"Oh, I remember when that happened," says Woodruff, who has since become good friends with the 60 Minutes correspondent. (People, in fact, sometimes confuse the two elegant blondes.) "I was not happy at all about it."

Perhaps the most shocking incident during her years at the White House was the attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981. Woodruff was onsite when it happened, pregnant with her first child. Reagan had just finished a speech at the Hilton in D.C. Woodruff was hustling over to lob a question when "We heard this pop, pop, pop and people started yelling, 'Get down!'"

Reagan was bundled into a car that took off. She had to make a split-second decision whe ther to follow his motorcade or stay in place. Three people were lying on the ground, including Reagan's press secretary, Jim Brady — "who I knew very well. That was the hardest thing for me," Woodruff says.

After quickly searing the scene's visual details into her memory bank, she immediately cast about for a way to report it. "Your job is to get the news out and put anything personal aside," she says. This was before cell phones. Reporters carried rolls of coins to plug into pay phones. The two nearest phones were taken, so she ran across the street into an office building, where she commandeered a phone and reeled off her eyewitness account to her desk.

Her husband, journalist Al Hunt, meanwhile, was on Capitol Hill conducting interviews for The Wall Street Journal and got word that three people had been shot. "Al, to this day, talks about how he stopped breathing for a while until he found out what had happened."

In 1983, Woodruff went to PBS for the first time. Hired as the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, she also hosted a documentary series, Frontline with Judy Woodruff. She stayed for ten years before accepting a job at CNN to host Inside Politics and CNN WorldView. She returned to NewsHour in 2006 as a rotating anchor. Eventually she and Gwen Ifill were teamed up on the program, making history as the first two women to coanchor an American network broadcast.

Ifill's death on November 14, 2016, was a blow to Woodruff; Ifill was also a close friend. But she went on air that night and has continued to helm NewsHour alone with her characteristic "precision, calm and grace," says PBS president Paula Kerger. "A trusted voice when trust is so very important."

The recent years — starting with the Trump administration — have been like no other period in her career. "It's not been a quiet time in Washington or in the country or in the world," she says, citing the pandemic, George Floyd's murder and the social justice protests. Thankfully, she adds, "I've had this amazing group of people I work with every day."

Early in the pandemic, her team set her up in a home studio, rigging her library with lights, black drapes, fifteen computers, monitors, the works. "I'm sure it was disruptive," Just says, "but she never once complained about it." Woodruff anchored NewsHour there for more than a year — as always, airing all sides, no matter the affiliation.

One day she's pressing U.S. Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) to explain her vote not to censure Paul Gosar (R-AZ) for posting an anime of himself killing their Democratic colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Then she's drawing the ire of Democrats, as when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took umbrage at Woodruff's question concerning Republican criticisms of Democrats over a Covid aid stalemate. Pelosi snapped, calling Woodruff an advocate
for the GOP.

Woodruff, unfazed, responded, "I'm playing devil's advocate here and asking you for your position," employing the same measured, congenial tone she has maintained throughout her career.

At this point, Woodruff is an authority on the cyclical nature of political reporting. "There are times when I feel, 'Gee, we've been through this debt ceiling fight before....'" Yet she never feels indifferent. "The curiosity never ends," she says. "It's my job to keep asking questions — and I love doing it."

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #1, 2022, under the title, "Matters of Fact."