By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 30, 2007
"Am I nuts?"
Campbell Brown raises the question herself, nursing a Diet Coke -- she's only allowed one a day because of her pregnancy -- at the Mayflower bar.
She has just quit NBC, where she tasted the fruits of fame as a weekend morning host and "Nightly News" backup, to launch a prime-time talk show for CNN. "I know how risky it is. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't scary. But it's also exhilarating, and I miss that feeling."
Brown, 39, also knows that she's the latest young and attractive network host to try to make it in the cable wars. "Appearance plays a role, there's no getting around it," says the 5-foot-8 journalist, adding that she's worried about her impending weight gain. "It's television," Brown says, and there is "no doubt" she will have a harder time in 15 years. "We live contract to contract."
Brown is replacing Paula Zahn, 51, the former CBS anchor who was herself deemed a hot young thing when she made the leap -- first to Fox News and then to CNN, which initially touted her as "a little bit sexy" in promos that were promptly yanked.
"The test will be 10 years from now, when we see how many of us are still on the air," Zahn says.
Brown's move raises two intriguing questions: Why are only two other women (Greta Van Susteren of Fox and Nancy Grace of Headline News) on the air as prime-time cable news hosts? And is it possible to succeed with an 8 p.m. show built on news and interviews -- as Zahn tried to do -- when up against the ultra-opinionated likes of Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann?
Zahn was pushed to try several different formats, from politics to magazine-style reports. She concedes the constant changes hurt her ratings, but she also won plaudits for tackling such difficult subjects as race in America. Still, despite some gains with younger viewers, she sometimes slipped into third or even fourth place (behind Grace).
"Looking at the success of the opinion-driven shows, we tried to counterpunch as best we could, and we never sacrificed our objectivity or our quality," Zahn says.
Brown now inherits a similar challenge. "It's an incredibly difficult time slot," she says. "I can't obsess over that or I'll make myself crazy. . . . I'm not Bill O'Reilly. I'm not Keith Olbermann. I'm not going to do opinion. That's not who I am."
The arena remains dominated by white men. Other women fronting prime-time cable shows, such as Deborah Norville and Rita Cosby, have come and gone. Barred by her NBC contract from starting until Nov. 1, Brown will be eight months pregnant when she begins the show.
"I'm going to be waddling onto the set," she says. "If people have a problem with women in these jobs, I'll be getting a rude awakening."
Brown, who is pulling for her former NBC colleague Katie Couric to succeed as CBS anchor, is disheartened by Couric's struggle: "The emphasis on Katie's appearance -- I hate it, it's so frustrating. You don't hear the same kind of comments about male anchors. You just don't."
The daughter of a former Louisiana secretary of state who spent six months in jail for lying to an FBI investigator -- he was caught up in a broader scandal involving former governor Edwin Edwards -- Brown has a Cajun's spicy approach to life. Friends say she plays as hard as she works.
"You wouldn't want to drive with her in a car," says one friend, Slate correspondent John Dickerson. "She goes after driving in the same way she does a story."
At 16, Brown was kicked out of the Madeira School in McLean for sneaking off campus to go to a party (which hasn't stopped school officials from constantly inviting her as a speaker). She was a self-described Colorado ski bum while in college, taught English in Czechoslovakia (where she acquired a banana tattoo on her ankle) and worked as an intern at Washington's NewsChannel8 and Montgomery Cable.
After that, the best that Brown could do was a $6-an-hour reporting job at the NBC station in Topeka, Kan. She moved up to the NBC station in Richmond, but "I could not for the life of me get a job in D.C.," Brown says. She finally made it to Baltimore's WBAL and did some freelancing for Washington's WRC before landing a job with NBC's affiliate service, churning out reports for local stations.
Brown's break came in 1998 when she was detailed to MSNBC, covering politics for Brian Williams's cable newscast. As for the broadcast side, she was a young woman in a hurry. "I could not get on 'Nightly News' to save my life," she grouses.
After covering George W. Bush's 2000 campaign for the cable channel, Brown got her shot at the big time when NBC made her a White House correspondent. Tom Brokaw and Williams, who was in line for Brokaw's anchor job, served as her mentors, and Brown's career quickly took off.
While living in Adams Morgan, she began hosting off-the-record gatherings with such administration hotshots as Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and Lynne Cheney. Only female correspondents were invited.
In 2003 Brown packed her bags for New York. She had been tapped as co-host of "Weekend Today" and eventually became Williams's primary substitute on NBC's nightly newscast.
Brown acknowledges she had problems adjusting to the fluffier side of morning television. She was accustomed to grilling then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, she says, and "you don't have to do that to the woman coming in to make pasta."
During a reporting trip to Iraq in 2004, Brown found herself at odds with Dan Senor, the spokesman for the U.S. civilian authority. "I wanted access and he didn't want me to have access," she recalls. "We just butted heads a lot."
Back home, she watched Senor's televised news conferences and told friends he was cute. Brown invited him to dinner to discuss foreign policy, and Brokaw somehow got included. That prompted a distress call to Brown's best friend, Washington reporter Anne Kornblut.
"She asked me to come to New York," says Kornblut, now with The Washington Post. "She said, 'I need someone to distract Brokaw so I can flirt with Dan.' "
It must have worked; the two tied the knot a year later, in what was Brown's second marriage. Senor now works at an investment fund and is a Fox News commentator. "These are two very ambitious, high-profile people," Dickerson says.
Last year, Brown was a contender for Couric's job at "Today" but was passed over for Meredith Vieira in what friends describe as a major disappointment.
"It's been written to death: 'Oh my God, she's leaving because she didn't get Katie's job.' Of course I wanted that job," Brown says. "Who wouldn't want that job? It's one of the best jobs in television."
Brown concluded that as a part-time anchor and correspondent -- she covered Hurricane Katrina and the death of Pope John Paul II -- there was no way for her to grow at NBC. "You've got 22 minutes at 'Nightly News,' which is Brian's show. You've got the 'Today' show, which is doing a limited amount of news."
Something else bothered her as well: a sense that the next generation is abandoning network news. "My younger sister, honest to God, has never seen 'Nightly News.' When anything happens in the world, she has on CNN. In cable you can go a little more in depth, be a little more inside baseball. In broadcast, you have to simplify things, and on occasion you're forced to dumb things down."
The tradeoff, of course, is that cable audiences are relatively modest -- 1 million is considered a strong showing -- compared with the 7 million to 8 million viewers who watch the Williams newscast. For the first time in her career, Brown will have to carry a show built around her personality, in an environment where outrage gets the highest ratings. That ultimately was too great a burden for Zahn, who also steered clear of opinion, and Brown freely admits: "It may not work."
Leaving NBC was hard -- Brown says she cried many times before telling her bosses she was leaving -- and the question was whether she wanted to remain in a comfortable environment, surrounded by friends.
Or, she says, "did I want to hold my breath and jump over the cliff?"
Howard Kurtz hosts CNN's weekly media program, "Reliable Sources."
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