Don’t ever call Judy Woodruff part of the “elite media” or an ivory-tower East Coast journalist. She has the perfect comeback.
“When they throw that at me, I say ‘Do you know where I’m from? I’m from Tulsa,’” she said in a phone interview.
Woodruff, managing editor and co-host of “PBS Newshour” with Gwen Ifill, will be back in her hometown April 13 to give the Distinguished Lectureship address at the Great Plains Journalism Awards and Conference at the Mayo Hotel.
Woodruff, who was born in Tulsa, moved away when she was 5 with parents Anita Lee (Payne) Woodruff and U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer William H. Woodruff. They first moved to Germany, then Missouri, New Jersey, back to Tulsa, then Taiwan, North Carolina and Augusta, Georgia, where she graduated from high school.
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She graduated from Duke University with a degree in political science and began her career — one that has spanned more than 40 years — as a news anchor for WAGA-TV in Atlanta.
An author of several books, she has covered some of the most historic events in recent history while working for CNN, NBC and PBS. She covered the Jimmy Carter’s campaign, the legendary Camp David Peace Accords and was in the pool of reporters standing near President Ronald Reagan when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. in March 1981. She was live for hours on CNN on 9/11 and came back to Oklahoma within days of the Oklahoma City bombing for a public ceremony at which President Bill Clinton spoke.
She said it was “eerie” to be in Oklahoma City on that day in April 1995.
“Here is a city where my family has lived for years,” said Woodruff, who lives in Washington, D.C., with husband journalist Al Hunt and where they reared their three children. “It’s just down the road from Tulsa. When there is a personal connection, there is a difference when you cover the story. You are already involved as a journalist but to also have knowledge because you are from there is different.
“The day Reagan was shot, I was 25 feet away. It was a day I was personally involved because I was there, unlike most of the press corps. It happening in Oklahoma City was different because that’s my home state.”
The Edward R. Murrow lifetime achievement award winner said she thought the OKC bombing was the first time Americans realized that “terror can be in our midst.”
“That it doesn’t have to be someone or something from outside our borders that wants to destroy us or wishes us ill will, but it can be from within our neighborhood, our own hometown.”
During the phone interview, Woodruff was juggling work and keeping up with the changing news landscape for her nightly news show — a landscape “turned upside down” by the Internet and social media.
“The essence of it is the same in that we are still here to find out what’s going on and share it with the public,” she said. “The difference is the public already knows, having their own ways of getting the news. Depending on who we are or what we do, whether you write for the Tulsa newspaper or a PBS news program, we are all coming at it from different directions. But the one thing we have in common is we are serving an audience that has already seen or had access to at least bits and pieces of what is going on.
“What we’ve got to figure how to do is add value. ... We add value by explaining to people why things matter, put them in context and provide more depth. We tell people what is going on the best we understand it and let them make up their own minds.”
This time when she returns to Tulsa, it won’t be for a story. It will be about family and friends, visiting her mother’s gravesite and feeling at home again.
“I have always felt very much a part of Tulsa and a part of Oklahoma,” she said.
