‘PBS NewsHour’ Anchor Amna Nawaz on Being a Muslim Journalist During the Trump Years – WWD

Amna Nawaz is an early riser. The “PBS NewsHour” correspondent usually gets up between 5 and 5:30 a.m. and heads out for a run near her Alexandria, Virginia, home.

Nawaz is Muslim and a first-generation American; her parents emigrated from Pakistan in 1975. Nawaz and her two sisters were actually raised in Alexandria, a bucolic town a short Metro ride from the nation’s capital. But they spent summers in Pakistan, visiting with extended family.

For Nawaz, a morning run in the early summer of 2018 stands out for all of the wrong reasons. It was only a few months after she joined “PBS NewsHour” and moved back to Alexandria from New York. And it was less than two years into the presidency of Donald Trump, who kicked off his campaign with belligerent anti-immigration rhetoric and, upon assuming office, enacted Executive Order 13769, which banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. The sun was just beginning to rise. Nawaz usually wore a baseball cap when she ran, but on this morning her long dark hair was uncovered. She was alone on a deserted street until a man in a white SUV approached.

“I still remember it to this day,” she said during a recent Zoom interview from her home office. “He rolled down his window and he banged on the side of the door and he just screamed ‘Trump!’ at the top of his lungs and sped off. And I just thought, if this is happening to me, it’s happening to other people too.”

As a political journalist, Nawaz is accustomed to the nationalist strain dominating Trump’s rallies and emanating from his Twitter feed. But the frequency did not make it any easier to process.

“As a visible minority, a brown woman in America, I have occasionally received some kind of racism,” she said. “Like a lot of news organizations, [we were] really struggling with many of the stories that would come out day-to-day from the Trump administration, whether it was a tweet, or some kind of hateful language. None of us are robots when we cover a story.”

Nawaz was hooked on journalism the moment she landed a fellowship at the ABC News Washington bureau in 2001. It was supposed to be a “stopover” between her undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy and economics (from the University of Pennsylvania) and law school. “But then 9/11 happened,” she said. “The whole world changed and I never looked back.”

On the day terrorists flew planes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and crashed a plane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, shocking the world, birthing the multitrillion-dollar war on terror and America’s longest wars, and unleashing a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, she was working at ABC’s “Nightline,” then anchored by Ted Koppel.

“You cannot have a better example of the highest journalistic integrity and capability than Ted Koppel,” she said as her dog Eliot (named after her favorite poet, T.S. Eliot), naps on the floor behind her desk. “And I studied at the feet of Ted Koppel in one of the most uncertain and fearful times in modern American history. So that was the bar for me, watching him in action after 9/11.”

After her fellowship, she earned a graduate degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics. In 2003, she returned to journalism at NBC News, where she worked in the investigative unit with Lisa Meyers, as a producer at “Dateline NBC” and later spearheaded the NBC Asian American vertical. She also spent several years as NBC’s Islamabad bureau chief, shuttling between hot spots in the region, including Kabul. She returned to ABC News in 2015, to cover politics and the fractious 2016 presidential campaigns. In 2018, she joined “PBS NewsHour,” moderating a 2019 Democratic presidential debate with “NewsHour” anchor Judy Woodruff. In June 2021, she was promoted to chief correspondent of “NewsHour.”

When Woodruff announced in November that she would depart at the end of 2022, after more than a decade at the program, Nawaz and Geoff Bennett — chief Washington correspondent and weekend anchor who joined PBS in 2022 from NBC News — were named her successors. Woodruff will sign off Friday; Nawaz and Bennett officially start Monday.

Nawaz has been the primary substitute anchor for “NewsHour” since 2018. With her promotion to anchor, Nawaz becomes the first Muslim American woman to head a national newscast. She is a mental health advocate who has reported on the PTSD experienced by journalists in war zones as well as America’s scourge of mass shootings. She has two prestigious Peabody Awards, one for her coverage of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and another for a PBS report about global plastic pollution. She is a member of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank fostering democratic governance, prosperity and social equity in Latin America and the Caribbean.

She is the mother of two daughters, Lina, 7, and Karam, 9, with husband Paul Werdel, a former New York Times product director who left his job to become a stay-at-home parent. An empathic anchor who wears her heart on her sleeve, Nawaz has been most affected by stories involving children, including the family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border and the murder of 19 children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

“I bring my whole self to this job. I don’t know another way to do it, other than to pour myself into it,” she said. “And sometimes that means that you feel things and you expect your viewers will feel things too.”

Here, Nawaz talks to WWD about her Pakistani heritage, her tenure as Islamabad bureau chief and what she learned from Woodruff.  

WWD: Did growing up as a child of immigrants inform your professional path?

Amna Nawaz: One thousand percent. I think this is part of the shared experience for a lot of first-generation kids; you come with a sense of gratitude but also a collective optimism and a sense of mission. You know what your parents went through making a home in a country where they had no safety net. I know how much they sacrificed for me and my sisters. This idea of collective hope is one I leaned into because when you choose to make America your home, when you choose to live here and have kids here and raise them here, what you’re saying is, I believe this country can be as good as she says she is. And I believe in all these ideals enough to leave everything I’ve ever known and travel all the way around the world and make a home. And my parents did that.

WWD: There has been a troubling rise in nationalism in America and throughout Europe. How does your experience as an immigrant affect how you report on this issue?

A.N.: My parents’ generation was really the first to grow up in independent Pakistan after the early (Indo-Pakistani) wars. The country has sort of careened between fledgling democracy and military dictatorship for most of its life so far. We grew up here, but at the end of the school year we would pack up and move to Pakistan for two or three months and travel around and see family. So we were intimately familiar with the culture and the history and the language and the food and everything else that makes us who we are. I saw up close how tenuous democracies can be, how fragile they can be, how easy it is for a system to crumble, not over a week or a month or a year, but over years. It’s death by 1,000 cuts.

As a foreign correspondent, I lived all over the world. I traveled to Zimbabwe in 2000, when I was in college, because I wanted to witness the first democratic election in the country’s independent history. And when I stood outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, and watched those swarms mobbing up the stairs and breaking the windows and breaking down the doors and threatening violence, it was an all too familiar scene to me. It was just something I never thought I would see in this country that I call home. It’s an incredibly worrying time. I think we’re at a critical moment in American history. But truly, I think there’s never been a better time to be a journalist because it’s exactly the kind of stuff I’ve been covering for years. And I’m ready to keep covering it.

WWD: One of the characteristics of authoritarianism is vilification of the press. And we have certainly seen that abroad and during the Trump administration. You’ve worked at ABC News and NBC News. Public broadcasting does not have a commercial imperative, and the news operations at PBS are still seen as striving for impartiality. Does that insulate PBS somewhat from this kind of criticism?  

A.N.: “PBS NewsHour” is still considered the most trusted and credible brand in news, which has always been something that the team is proud of. But I think these days, as we’ve seen trust in media decline, it means that much more. My work at the “NewsHour” is following in the same path that my work at ABC and NBC did. My job is to provide light, not heat. It’s such a messy media landscape right now; it’s really hard for people to discern what is true. We try to offer a very clear source of credible, trustworthy information. And it is such a simple mission. But I think adhering to that simple mission is exactly what sets us apart. We’re not concerned about advertisers; we don’t have to worry about that. That is a luxury. We have an hourlong broadcast, we get to take time to explore some of these issues that other broadcasts don’t. And this is not knocking the commercial networks. I loved my experiences there; I grew up there, I learned how to be a journalist there. And being able to condense a complicated subject into a minute, 30, is a very special skill.

WWD: Has Judy Woodruff given you any words of wisdom as she steps down as “NewsHour” anchor?

A.N.: I know what women in her generation had to go through to get where they were going. My generation can never say thank you enough for the many doors they kicked open and then held open so others could walk in behind them, which was not true of every woman in that generation. Judy is a leader in that space, and she always maintained that compassion and that humanity. I think about covering Uvalde and how gutting that was; something in me broke covering that. And I knew people at home felt that too. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making that connection with people. Judy has allowed me to do that, she has encouraged me to do that. And I think she’s recognized that all of us, at the end of the day, are human beings.

WWD: Social media platforms amplify the most belligerent voices. But they can also be a useful tool for journalists. How much do you interact with social media and do you find that you need to detox from it?

A.N: It can do that. But I tend to look at that as a bug and not a feature. I am — probably unreasonably so — an eternal optimist. I think you have to be to do this job. You have to believe that the work that you are doing every day is making things a little bit better. Otherwise I don’t think you could show up and do it with a full heart. Setting Twitter aside for a moment — because I think that is its own separate problem right now — I see social media as another chance to reach our audience, wherever they are, or new audiences, people who may not come into contact with our work because they don’t necessarily [watch] an hourlong broadcast every day. It’s another opportunity to try to get my work and the work of my colleagues in front of more people.

I do still learn a lot from social media. I come into contact with all kinds of people who are sending me story ideas, or things that are happening in their neighborhoods. When Twitter was not under its current ownership, it was a great source of breaking news and information. You could get dribs and drabs of breaking news and ongoing and developing stories there. And I still think it’s a chance to connect with people that you otherwise wouldn’t come into contact with. I got into this job because I really like people. I find people very interesting; I like talking to them. People from all walks of life, people who run countries and people who run food kitchens in their neighborhoods. There still exists the potential for those connections and that’s a positive, maybe to a diminishing degree. I’m trying to use it responsibly. I have a guiding principle: what good shall I do today? And I have the same approach to social media. I don’t tweet angry things. I don’t share complaints. I’m there to share information. I’m there to share stories.

WWD: You’re still on Twitter. Are you thinking of migrating to another platform, like Mastodon?

A.N.: I haven’t seriously considered it, but it may come to that.

WWD: Which stories have left a lasting impression on you?

A.N.: I think about [the Uvalde] families often. I’m in touch with them; that very much stays with me. Before that, covering the family separation stories at the border haunted me for weeks. There was one little girl in particular, a three-year-old. I met her in Juarez, Mexico, with her grandmother and we walked across the border into El Paso, Texas. And then I got a call within a day or two that they had been separated. And I spent the next seven weeks of my life fully invested in her story and trying to figure out where she was, trying to connect with her family, who are already here in the States and tracking down every source I could within the White House and within Homeland Security and within what was then the care system at HHS [Health and Human Services]. And I was there on the day that she was flown across the country to be reunited with her family. But for seven weeks I didn’t really sleep. I was just obsessed with trying to get this one little girl reunited with her family.

I think it hit me so hard because she was the same age as my little one at the time, my Lina. She had that same little whale spout of hair right on top of her head, and the same huge grin that takes over 70 percent of her face when she smiles. And every night I’d be putting my kids to bed and rubbing their backs and telling them it’s OK and giving them a hug. And immediately I would think who’s doing that for her? I think it will be looked back as one of our darkest chapters in our American history. And I don’t think we even know the full extent of it yet — the damage that was wrought.

WWD: Right, and in many ways it’s yet another example of what can happen when we vilify an entire group of people.

A.N.: I think making those connections to our history is so important in these situations. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and we need to understand how it happens. I was at NBC when I launched the Asian America vertical, and I remember going back and digging more deeply into [the Japanese internment camps established during World War II]. At that time, we decided to incarcerate 100,000 of our own citizens simply because of their country of origin. We do these things as a system and as a nation. And when we don’t recognize why they happened before and how we got there before, we will repeat them in the future. And I do think that’s part of our responsibility as journalists — to tell the American people the truth about who we are, who we’ve been but also who we are becoming and who we can be.

WWD: You were at ABC News on Sept. 11. What was that experience like for you?

A.N.: I was at “Nightline” in [Washington, D.C.]. They had this random one-year fellowship where they bring in someone who has absolutely no journalism experience. And that was me. I thought it was going to be a stopover and then I was going to go to law school. But then the world changed, and my place in it changed too.

WWD: Who were your mentors, the people who helped you figure things out?  

A.N.: None of us get where we’re going alone. That is a hard truth. I had incredible bosses. I studied at the feet of Ted Koppel in one of the most uncertain and fearful times in modern American history. So that was the bar for me, watching Ted Koppel in action after 9/11. I had two wonderful executive producers there: Tom Bettag and his co-EP Leroy Sievers, who passed away several years ago. They were wonderfully supportive of me and saw how important it was for there to be someone like me in the newsroom, and in the conversation. I was one of the very few women of color. I was the only Muslim in the newsroom. And suddenly, a lot of the stories we were doing focused on the faith that I had grown up in and about bombs being dropped in the part of the world that I come from. They always did a wonderful job encouraging the younger generation of journalists, which is not the typical first experience for journalists starting out in this business.

WWD: And it was at NBC News that you transitioned from producer to anchor.

A.N.: I eventually went on camera there. I became a foreign correspondent. I was the bureau chief in Islamabad for NBC News. It was the first three years of my marriage, and this is something I don’t recommend. [Laughs] I would bounce between Islamabad and Kabul. I got pulled into covering the war in Syria and spent a lot of time on the Turkish border. But I spent about eight or nine months every year on the road for those three or four years and my husband was back in New York. So we learned to communicate very well.

WWD: That’s a lot of separation and does not seem like something you would want to do once you had kids.

A.N.: Exactly. I did one of my last military embeds in North Waziristan with the Pakistan army when I was about three and half months pregnant. Only my husband and I knew and I just thought, this is unsustainable.

WWD: Right, because anything can happen out there.

A.N. And also the flak jacket fits differently. [Laughs]

WWD: And the nausea.

A.N.: Yes! Awful. I felt horrible the whole time. And they just thought I was having a tough time with helicopters. And I was like, “No, I’m growing a human inside of me.” But I couldn’t tell them.

WWD: And then you went to ABC News, where you covered a lot of politics. Do you prefer one over the other? Overseas reporting or politics? I mean, covering politics these days seems pretty awful.

A.N.: Here’s the thing: I think about politics in the way that it impacts people. That is my guiding principle — who is not in the room? What questions do I need to ask because these people who are being impacted aren’t here to ask them themselves? That’s what I think about when I’m in the White House briefing room or when I have a chance to interview an administration official. Who am I speaking on behalf of?  

WWD: Your promotion to “NewsHour” anchor will put you behind a desk. Can you shape the anchor role so that you can be out in the field a little more?

A.N.: I think staying in a sanitized anchor bubble at a desk isn’t going to serve anyone, least of all our audience and the people that we’re here to serve. And for me as a journalist, it doesn’t work. I love being out in the world, being inside people’s homes and talking to them where they live and witnessing what they go through every day. I think all of that makes me a better journalist. And becoming an anchor doesn’t mean I stopped being a journalist, the two have to coexist. I think with two of us [co-anchor Geoff Bennett], we have a greater capability and flexibility. And that was certainly part of the design and intention. I wouldn’t want to do this job and be tethered to a desk full-time. It’s not who I am as a journalist, and it’s not the way I do my journalism.