Rough Draft: A Memoir

by Katy Tur

Journalism is known as the first rough draft of history. But at the peak of a lucky career, in the pit of that awful year in America, I found myself thinking through a first rough draft of myself. I hadn’t seen my father in years. I was thinking about quitting journalism. I was afraid for the future of the country.

It’s a little hard to imagine now, but journalism was a hot profession in 1978. Magazines and television companies were fat and rich. The work of their news teams had just ended a presidency and helped close out a war. To borrow a line from an old magazine writer I know, journalism in the seventies was a “get laid” profession. And who doesn’t want to get laid?

They’ll never know Los Angeles as a native. In a sense, I worry, that means they’ll never really know me.

His anger could be triggered by almost anything, but especially if he thought you were being weak or sad when he thought you should be happy.

I told him about one overnight, in rural Colorado, when we stayed in what was perhaps America’s worst roadside inn. Tripadvisor still has a page up for the doomed establishment with a too generous 1 star rating. The first review reads: “pigsty.”

The mint on my pillow was, on closer inspection, dried blood. The water in the bathroom faucet gurgled out brown. I went back out to the parking lot where I noticed one of our video editors getting into her car. She was palming a handle of whiskey and lowering the backseat.

Another colleague was fishing around in his trunk for what he called his “chastity sack,” a sleeping bag for traveling germophobes. As for me, I looked across the road at the “No Vacancy” sign outside the Motel 6 and prayed for a cancellation. I was in luck.

This is how I feel about every twist and turn in my father’s story and my own. At times, she has felt like a curse. Other times, she has felt like a blessing. I can thank my father for training me, pushing me, shaping me as a reporter and broadcaster. I can hate her for hitting me, slapping me, chasing me, hurting my mother and brother, kicking my dog, and burning down our lives. But my father’s role in my life is not good or bad or both or neither. It’s everything. And it’s nothing. Because the story is always still unfolding.

I’d dealt with this kind of behavior before. This insistence on attention. This love of coverage and publicity, no matter how good or bad. This obsession with respect and tolerance for fighting and feuding. I recognized the mix of victimhood and outrage, the how-could-yous and how-dare-yous—because I’d seen it all before in my own family. My father is not Donald Trump and Donald Trump is not my father. But if anyone asked me, I’d recommend the same therapist.

A month into my job, the Daily Mail called out an anchor in Australia for wearing the same outfit on two occasions within half a year. (Headline: “That’s Thrifty!”) There’s also an incalculable amount of leering at the news. Some of the women who cover business are written about as “money honeys.” There’s at least one network where all the women are supposedly required—or at least strongly urged—to wear body-contouring, candy-colored outfits. Every woman in news has heard some version of the phrase: shoulders back, tits up. Sometimes the message is subtler but the intention is unmistakable. Your looks matter. This isn’t radio.

To this day my husband tells me there are body-part-related clips of me on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of views.

Have you heard of this new thing called a blazer? Men wear them a lot. Now I do too. Blazer over a blouse.

I want to look like myself and I want our coverage to keep you interested. About that coverage: I knew for sure that I didn’t want it to be partisan. I wanted to be fair. The struggle, as we moved into Trump’s presidency, was the reality that fair meant we had to note that the president said incorrect things, a lot. More than past presidents. It was daily.

But while viewers always allege that they want in-depth, nonpartisan coverage, the ratings throughout the industry suggest that while that’s an appreciation, it’s not a passion. It doesn’t win the ratings or clicks.

You try to be even-tempered, almost serene. Even when you’re covering a tipped Porta-Potty of political news. In that first year, the ratings were up, way up, insanely elevated by the insane stuff coming out of Washington. We’re talking double-digit increases over what were already double-digit increases during the 2016 campaign, all across the network. And while every network was up, we were routinely beating CNN for the first time in years.

No journalist under the age of thirty-five, in fact, has ever had a day in their life in which they could honestly say that most Americans generally trusted what they do. That’s what the Gallup polls have been saying for decades.

Trust peaked after Watergate in 1974—nearly 70 percent of people had a great deal or at least a fair amount of trust in mainstream media. By the Clinton era, it was down to 53 percent. By the Bush era, down to 44 percent. And during the Trump years, it hit a new low of 32 percent.

More people than ever were watching or reading the news. But fewer people than ever were trusting it.

Inside the theater, the air smelled like old New York, like afternoon newspapers, your wife cooking dinner, and cocktails on a tray. It also smelled like television, or the making of television, anyway, like decades of heavy wiring and dust and electricity. The airtight door in front of me led directly to the stage, but the “ON AIR” sign above it was still dark. We were at least an hour before the taping and many hours before the show airs.

A different production assistant had a question. “Tom Hanks would like to stop by to say hello. Is that okay?” No, please tell the nicest guy in Hollywood to fuck off, I thought sarcastically. “Yes, that’ll be fine.” Tom Hanks likes journalists, or at least he values independent journalism. In the nineties, he noticed that the coffee machine in the Clinton White House briefing room was an old filter thing. Plastic. Half melted. I picture it molded over after the last pour before a holiday break. Hanks replaced it with a fancy espresso machine. In 2004, he did it again for the journalists covering the Bush White House. Then he replaced that machine in 2010 for everyone covering Barack Obama. And again in 2017.

Tom Hanks, the real live person and not a recording, told me he was a big fan of my work on the campaign trail. You did a good job, he said. Hell of a campaign. I was in shock, so I barely said anything, but I did give him one of my books. He was on the show to talk about The Post, a new movie about the clattering heroism of old-school journalism. I hadn’t seen the movie yet, but we’ve all seen a version of it. Smoke-filled rooms. Terrible comb-overs. Scant female journalists.

Hanks was playing star editor Ben Bradlee. “He was like a model of a newsman” is how Stephen Colbert described the character. And Tom Hanks agreed. “Oh, he lived and died for it,” he said.

Ben Bradlee is undeterred. He picks up a chunk of the report and says, in that growl we just heard from the Hanks on Colbert’s couch: “Thanks to the president of the United States, who by the way, is taking a shit all over the First Amendment, we have the goods.” He puts his feet up on a desk. “So we dig in.” End clip. Stories like these cast a long cold shadow over our own. They foster the idea that these great icons of the past built an industry, then my generation came along and broke it all.

If you’ve been a broadcast journalist for any amount of time, you’ve had the experience of being compared to Walter Cronkite and chances are the comparison was not a favorable one. I’ve actually won a Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism, and accepting the award at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., might be one of the proudest moments of my career. The citation said my work on the 2016 campaign deserved to be celebrated for “demonstrating the honor of [my] profession.”

“Cronkite would be turning over in grave [sic] if he saw Katy Tur,” reads a typical, typo-prone message I get almost daily. “Thinks she is Cronkite,” chides another. “Katy Tur is a turd,” remarks a third. “These young journalists need to take time and sit down and watch the great TV journalists of the past. Cronkite comes to mind.”

But according to Brinkley, Cronkite and his producing team at CBS faked some of the footage. They shot the interview, then reshot some of the anchor’s questions and spliced in the footage to alter the meaning of different moments. For example, Brinkley writes, when LBJ was discussing the Vietnam War—which the public had soured on—Cronkite and company inserted a fake cutaway shot of the great anchor raising a skeptical eyebrow. I have to say, this is definitely a lose-your-job and never-work-again level offense.

Now maybe you think I’m cherry-picking out of an eight-hundred-page book about a forty-year career, and that’s true to some extent. But these are not minor incidents. They’re epic failures, and what’s remarkable about them today is the extent to which they have either been forgotten or misremembered by the general public.

Brinkley says that Cronkite covered the civil rights movement in such a way that some of the southern CBS affiliates complained and took to calling CBS the “Colored Broadcasting Station.”

The fact is that Cronkite was “a man of the left,” as Brinkley later put it in a C-SPAN interview. He called the Chicago police “a bunch of thugs,” wondered why more Americans weren’t livid about the My Lai Massacre, implied that Barry Goldwater was some sort of neo-Nazi, and dedicated nearly two thirds of the Evening News to Watergate coverage—just days before the 1972 election.

In return, a lot of conservatives hated him. They wore lapel buttons that said “Stop Cronkite.” Others flipped him the finger in public.

Now, look, I understand it was a different time and the standards have changed. But I’m not talking about Brinkley writing about how Cronkite was once spotted in a topless bar, or dining with a go-go dancer not his wife, or narrating a propaganda film for the Pentagon. I’m talking about his work.

We decided that some of the “greatest” journalists of all time are in fact just the luckiest. Only their best is remembered, but a lot of their work would now be considered the worst of the worst. Journalism today is not a fallen profession and it isn’t a perfected one, either. But it’s getting better. We still write a rough draft of history, only now it’s a more scrupulous and accountable one than ever before because we have nowhere to hide. Everything we do is recorded.

For the record, I am still very proud to have won a Cronkite award. I still think he is a great journalist. My point is that he was a human being too. He was trying his best just like the rest of us.

Estrangement is loss. Estrangement is work. You only do it if you have to. You only do it if you don’t have a good alternative.

Our job is to elevate the facts that matter regardless of who they benefit. But to people like these Trump supporters, we’re out to hurt Trump and help the Democrats. Because of that perception the president gets a free pass from his fans. He could in theory (or fact) screw up 90 percent of the time and they wouldn’t blame him. They’d blame us. They’d say we were shading reality, not reflecting it. Then they’d loathe us even more. And the cycle would continue. In that way, the worse the president performed, the more we’d be hated by covering it, and the more he’d be forgiven his failures.

“The news should make you uncomfortable,” I said. “If everything you read or watch gives you comfort, you’re doing it wrong.”

Sometimes the video adds up to a portrait of the most amazing, loving, and exceptional family, a kind of traveling circus of journalists, with kids and parents and Grandma Judy. Other times, the moments are ugly or scary or sad. Or all three. I understand why it turned out this way. I’ll never understand why it had to.

My father and I are texting again, if only barely. I send kid pictures and she offers perfunctory replies. We’re not talking by phone, not hanging out in person. She hasn’t met Tony or Teddy or Eloise, who arrived in the spring of 2021.

When I reread that old New York Times piece, which included quotes from my father, I was surprised to see her almost willing this project into existence, summoning it from her keyboard to my own. “About my transition,” she wrote to the reporter, “no child should have to deal with a father in transition from male to female. Perhaps it will be the subject of Katy’s second book!”

Maybe this will open a door, start a new chapter. Maybe one of us will call, and one of us will pick up, and we’ll start talking. Then again, maybe we won’t, and it’s possible that’s for the best. After all, I’m dealing with the past already.

No one can choose the gifts of their childhood. But everyone can work to reject its worst lessons. That’s what I’m trying to do.

My dad has said she worked as hard as she possibly could to rid herself of the rage she’d learned from her own father. I don’t know how she’s doing now, but she failed when we were kids and we still haven’t had a real conversation about it.

“Before the sex change and the estrogen, I was infused with this wonder drug called testosterone, and testosterone in my system really equals asshole,” she says in one of the clips.

In the film, she says rage made her “a very good newsperson,” and for her time and place it’s hard to disagree. If she was on a story, there was no stopping her. She always got the shot. But in that documentary she also admits to a darker side, describing her rage as “incompatible” with friendship and family life.

I’ve grown to appreciate that life is never one thing at a time. It’s always giving and taking, not in turn but all at once, and I have to admit that it’s given me a lot.

Journalism can’t save us. Perfect parenting can’t save us. Our lives are one long rough draft and none of us will know how we’ve done until many years from now, long after the memories have gone cold, and maybe not even then. All we can do is try.