The new coanchor of CNN's "State of the Union" was never slated for overnight success. She's fine with that.
Dana Bash Meets Her Moment
It seems impossible now that Dana Bash would ever have questioned a future in journalism. This is a woman who has worked in the business for almost three decades. Who has twice been awarded the prestigious Dirksen Award from the National Press Foundation. Who told Esquire that just before CNN called the election in November for Joe Biden, she was so tired that she and her producer slept head-to-foot on the couch cushions in her office. This is a woman who was born for this—and born to this. Her father was a veteran producer at ABC News. Her mother studied journalism at Northwestern.
But Bash is insistent: She did not so much pursue a career in news as succumb to one. Despite growing up in control rooms and never missing an episode of World News Tonight as a kid, she had no keen interest in the profession, which had a habit of cutting short vacations because her father had to race to the studio when news broke. Journalism meant disruption, and for most of her adolescence, Bash tried to resist the pull of her DNA.
Then as an undergraduate at George Washington University, she landed an internship at CBS and experienced the thrill of the trade for the first time. She was dispatched to The Palm in D.C. on a tip that Clarence Thomas—who was then embroiled in his contentious nomination process, after Anita Hill had come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment—was planning to have lunch. He didn’t show, but Bash was awed. The stakeout! The adrenaline.
“The idea of being part of the action—that’s what drew me to it,” Bash recalls.
She’d like to tell me that her ambitions were purer—that she wanted to expose corruption or have an impact on the world. And those motivations did come later. But back then, she wanted the rush.
The job delivered. Dana Bash has crisscrossed the globe covering politics. She’s broadcast live from political conventions and spent marathon sessions on air, explaining the ins and outs of election returns to millions of anxious, rattled viewers. She is a household name to those who depend on cable news when ballots have to be tallied and a hero to those who heard her deliver perhaps the line of the entire election season when in 2020 she deemed the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden “a shitshow” on live television.
So it might come as a surprise then that when we sit down to talk about her first few months as the cohost of CNN’s State of the Union, the woman who got into journalism for its flash and excitement, and is now a fixture on one of the biggest news networks on TV, characterizes her career as an exercise in patience. The word she uses in fact is slog.
But the facts are these: In a field of wunderkinds and instant sensations, Bash is a slower and steadier success. She has worked at CNN since she was 22, when she landed a job logging tape in predigitized television. That gig turned into an associate producer role, which in turn led to more senior producer positions. When she was tapped to become one of CNN’s White House correspondents in 2008, she had been with the network for well over a decade. After that she was named its chief political correspondent. And it wasn’t until after that, at the start of 2021, that she was at last promoted to lead a coveted slot of weekend programming.
There are meteoric rises, and then there’s Bash, who has watched more than one coworker climb the ranks faster than she. This might seem somehow uncouth to point out, were it not for the fact that Bash herself is glad to talk about it. “I didn’t begrudge those people,” she tells me. When she first started at CNN, she didn’t think she wanted to be on TV at all, preferring to remain behind the scenes as a sourced-up producer. And once she did move in front of the camera, she tried to keep her head down and focus on making the most of the opportunities she did have—moderating presidential debates, landing ever more impressive interviews, breaking as much news as possible, impressing the higher-ups when she filled in for Jake Tapper on State of the Union. (He is now her cohost.)
When she wonders aloud during our interview whether people who were promoted ahead of her just had a better knack for the job or more obvious talent, she doesn’t sound like someone rooting around for a compliment. She sounds like a person who knows what she’s best at—outworking the competition and learning from them too. She points to the next generation of talent—women like current CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and Inside Politics host Abby Phillip. “I have seen them, not just on air but behind the scenes, demonstrate an inner confidence that I did not have when I was that age,” she explains. “And that has helped with their rises. It’s earned,” she hastens to add, but it speaks to a skill set she felt it took her longer to develop. She could not have done what they’ve done.
If Bash took a more winding path to the top, it’s in part, she thinks, because she needed the time to build up a sense of herself that criticism and blowback couldn’t shake. In the end she didn’t read one great self-help book or have some incredible revelation. She just forced herself to do it—to stand up at press conferences, to ask the questions. The more she did it, the more confidence she had. The more experience she got, the more comfortable she felt at work.
Still, she is conscious of the forces at work that no amount of confidence can overcome—the ones that keep women from reaching their full potential. And even now, with her name on the marquee, she leans on the women who came up alongside her more than ever. She rattles off the names: Gloria Borger, Brooke Baldwin, Brianna Keiler, Poppy Harlow, Alisyn Camerota, Erin Burnett. “I just feel like I have a net because of this female camaraderie that exists and, to be frank, a place to bitch sometimes. Because it’s still a man’s world.” There are careful, unfair calibrations that women must make in the hope of navigating professional quandaries that Bash knows men don’t have to deal with—how to “not be seen as the whiner, as opposed to the go-getter,” how to not be perceived as a “diva,” when a man’s demanding behavior might be lauded as ambitious or passionate.
The women’s active group texts must have been a particular source of comfort during the last administration, when, in addition to the usual high-wire juggling act that exists for women in the workplace, Bash had to perform the added ritual of waking up in the Trump era: Get out of bed, look at the president’s now-defunct Twitter feed, and wonder, “Who is he attacking? Is he attacking me?” Some fretted over what would become of journalism once Trump left office, since the former president drove so much of the conversation, but Bash feels “reborn.”
“To get up in the morning and cover immigration, cover the COVID situation, cover the climate crisis, which matters a lot—yes, Washington is partisan,” she admits. “There’s backbiting. But it’s rejuvenating to be able to focus on issues.” Bash is determined to use her new platform to explain the news to her audience and also to introduce people who watch CNN to “new people, new voices, new faces, people whom they don’t see and hear all the time on cable news but who are interesting, up-and-comer, behind-the-scenes people.”
She knows she needs a mix of both to make the show a success; people tune in to programs like State of the Union to get a breakdown of the most current news headlines. But Bash has a soft spot for those in the second group. After all the time she’s spent covering politics, she is more attuned than most to how power centers in Washington work and who is fueling them. “There are the people who run to the cameras and who know how to give a tremendous sound bite,” she explains. But she wants to hear from the quieter changemakers. The people who are “toiling away, doing really good stuff, and their stories don’t get told.”
Mattie Kahn is the culture director of Glamour.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Mattie Kahn
