Echo Profile: Early rising star

CNN may pride itself on its international reach but here in the U.S. its main breakfast-time show has a uniquely Irish – or at least Irish-American – flavor. Turn on “American Morning” during any weekday and it’s odds-on that one anchor’s chair will be occupied by Soledad O’Brien and the other by Miles O’Brien.
The two O’Briens are unrelated, but their mere presence fronting such a major show serves to highlight the prominence of Irish-Americans in the mainstream news media.
Indeed, “American Morning” for a brief recent period had the distinction of having three major contributors all of whom were Irish-American — the amusingly grouchy Jack Caffrey was also a regular part of the mix. Caffrey now plows his faux-misanthropic furrow on CNN’s new afternoon mainstay, “The Situation Room.”
Miles O’Brien is a relatively recent arrival at “American Morning.” He replaced Bill Hemmer in June – and an irked Hemmer departed for CNN’s bitter rival, Fox News, soon afterwards. O’Brien was formerly a daytime anchor for the network, and continues to serve as its space correspondent.
The real ‘face’ of “American Morning,” however, is Soledad O’Brien. She has been presenting the show for more than two years. Though based in New York, O’Brien is hardly tethered to the anchor desk. During her time at the helm she has covered everything from the Asian tsunami to the burial of Yasser Arafat. She was also on the scene in Ohio when the voters of the Buckeye State in effect decided the outcome of last year’s presidential election.
Though still relatively young at 39, O’Brien seems well established in the viciously competitive world of broadcast journalism. She first came to prominence as a local anchor on an NBC affiliate in San Francisco, KRON. She later moved back to her native New York to work at NBC News, and in the mid-1990s she boosted her national profile as presenter of “The Site,” a technology show on the fledgling MSNBC network. Prior to moving to CNN, she had become a regular anchor on the weekend version of NBC’s massively successful “Today Show”.
Despite being in the spotlight for around a decade, however, O’Brien has avoided becoming either gossip column fodder or the subject of controversy. She largely abjures the attitude-laden style of presentation favored by some anchors, while her personal life seems positively wholesome — she is married to Brad Raymond, whom she met when they were both students at Harvard, and the couple have four children.
If O’Brien has either tumult-stirring opinions or a private life fizzling with shocking misbehavior, she isn’t about to let the Echo in on the secret. That is not to say that O’Brien is hostile or without a sense of humor. Talking last Friday, she was, in fact, the epitome of professional friendliness. And a dry wit sometimes peeked through, as when she was asked about her early days in the news business.
“I did an internship, so I took staples out of walls, answered phones and fetched coffee,” O’Brien said. “And then I got hired as assistant to the medical reporter, which meant I took staples out of her walls, answered her phone and fetched her coffee.”
Most of the time, though, O’Brien was brisk and businesslike. Any inquiries that could lead into even slightly contentious territory were batted away – one question about whether Fox News’ more polemic style poses challenges to journalistic quality, especially at an outlet like CNN, was answered with a generalizing response that focused primarily on the new George Clooney movie about Ed Murrow, “Goodnight And Good Luck.”
O’Brien, like many people, was most interesting talking about the earliest phase of her life. Her parents met in an America riven with racial discord. Her father is Australian-Irish (his Irish roots are in County Cork) and white. Her mother is Cuban and black.
O’Brien tends to treat her own ethnic mix with a light touch. She said that people laugh when they see her without makeup “because I have so many freckles that I look very Irish.” She also gently mocked the notion that her mixed-race background exposed her to unimaginable horrors.
“I have had people say, like, ‘Oh, so you were a tragic mulatto?’ Well, um, not exactly. I was just a middle-class girl growing up on Long Island.”
Asked about her parents’ experiences, however, she swiftly – and understandably – became more serious.
It isn’t possible, she contended, “to over-dramatize” what they went through. Her parents met as students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. At the time, racism was so rabid that interracial marriage was banned outright in the city. When O’Brien’s parents were dating, restaurants would not serve them together.
“They were doing stuff that for the time was very risky – socially risky and risky to their own physical safety. And they decided they were going to go ahead and get married and have six kids,” their daughter recalled.
“When I was an adult, I would ask them what that was like,” she continued. “‘Oblivious’ isn’t the right word… but they felt people’s opinions were irrelevant to what they wanted to do.”
Despite O’Brien’s obvious admiration for her parents, she backed away from ascribing overly grandiose descriptions to their attitudes. Asked whether she found their moral courage inspiring, she balked.
“Moral courage can [seem] very high falutin’,” she said. “I think they just thought: ‘We want to get married, so we’ll go to DC and get married.’ It wasn’t like [she adopts a booming mock-heroic voice], ‘Hey, we’re going to have great moral courage and just plow ahead.'”
O’Brien grew up in the Long Island town of Smithtown. Despite her reluctance to make her upbringing appear anything but happy, she noted that she and her five siblings were physically conspicuous in the overwhelmingly white neighborhood.
“You’re definitely different; your family sticks out and that’s just kind of the way it is,” she said.
Though putting no gloss on the evils of racism itself, O’Brien acknowledged that her feelings of being in some way “apart” from the mainstream may help in her current job.
“I think being an outsider helps you in observing things and being sensitive to differences. But it also makes you open to a lot of perspectives, and that in a way is more important. I have always felt very comfortable in a lot of different situations,” she said.
O’Brien’s upbringing, she contended, had also solidified her commitment to diversity in the workplace.
“I think a lot of people think diversity’s a code word for black people or it’s a code word for Hispanic people. To me it’s not. It means real diversity, opening up a discussion to a lot of different voices,” she said.
O’Brien herself — as surely the only Irish-Australian-Cuban-American anchor around — is living proof of the importance and the benefits of that diversity.
Though she gave the impression of taking pride in her professional success, there does not seem to be much danger of her becoming enthralled by her own growing fame, or the world of celebrity in general. Asked whether any one interview she had conducted stood out as her favorite, she declined to highlight any big names:
“A lot of the ones that people would count as important are not the ones that really move you the most. The ones that move you are the ones with regular people, because they don’t have an agenda and they’re not there to pitch a book,” she said. “There was one young woman I interviewed, who was 16 years old and had shrapnel in her body from Columbine. She was a remarkable, brave little kid who took your breath away. That sort of thing is the most moving for me. That’s more important that me listing a lot of elected officials for you.”