WASHINGTON — Asked how important is local news, Martha Raddatz, who has covered foreign conflicts for decades and moderated presidential debates for ABC News, said today that, in fact, “it is the seed of everything.”
In a keynote interview at The Business of TV News event here, Raddatz told B+C Multichannel News senior content producer Michael Malone that her first reporting trip to Israel in 1988 was for WCVB, the ABC affiliate station in Boston.
“Local news is everything,” she told Malone. “It is what people should be watching. It is what they should be learning about their community. It is your place in the larger national and world picture. And that is where it begins.”
Read More: Coverage From the Business of TV News Event
Raddatz, co-anchor of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, gave props to David Muir, anchor of the network’s World News Tonight and a fellow WCVB alum. “He connects to people not only on a national level, but a community level, a local level,” she said. “Your audience is local, national and worldwide, but it starts local.”
Asked about her own work, she spoke with pride about The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family, her book that became an eight-part scripted series for National Geographic TV. It chronicled the tragic experience of the U.S. Army soldiers who served during the siege of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2004. “I kept going back to the same unit in Iraq for their entire 15-month deployment,” she said, and also reported on the impact on their families back in the States.
This past April 4, she said, she attended a 20th reunion of survivors of the “Black Sunday” events and their families.
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“Many I've stayed in touch with over the years,” she said. “And it was so powerful to see them. I think many of them have had real struggles. And as I said to all ofth'em, I think the courage it has taken to get you 20 years after that horrendous battle to where you are today and functioning and contributing to society is more courageous than what they actually did that very day.”
Asked by Malone if she was surprised when President Biden, who rarely gives interviews, went on the Howard Stern program recently, Raddatz said, "I was and I wasn't. Remember, [Biden's campaign] is now on TikTok, so he's clearly reaching out to younger voters. The bottom line for that interview is, look how many people listen to Howard Stern ... and the demographic of Howard Stern's audience. That's how campaigns choose where you'll go, what you'll do, whether you're going after mainstream media, whether you're going after younger voters. ... Whether or not it's successful, we'll see about that."
Raddatz was asked what advice she would give to an aspiring journalist. “Read history, study history, learn lessons from history, find journalists you think are journalists first,” she said.
Aspiring broadcast journalists might want to be on TV, she said. “But you are a journalist first. And remember that mission. And remember also that you are storytellers.” If a story seems unappealing, find a different approach to it. “But I think more than anything, find people outside your building to talk to. Don't just talk among yourselves about things.”
The Business of TV News was a daylong event produced by Future B2B’s B+C, Multichannel News and Next TV.
