By Susan Josephs
On her first day at CNN, Dana Bash got chewed out by a news anchor for screwing up his newscast. She had been filling in for someone on vacation in the feeds room, unaware that her responsibilities also included feeding scripts to a teleprompter for the newscast.
“The newscast was nonsensical and the anchor comes flying in, looks at me and asks, ‘Who are you?’” she recalls. “I said, ‘It’s my first day on the job,’ and he says, ‘It’s going to be your last.’ I thought I was going to throw up.’”
Instead, Bash rose steadily through the ranks of CNN as a producer and on–air reporter covering the White House. Today, the 39-year-old broadcast journalist is CNN’s senior correspondent on Capitol Hill, where she frequently interviews members of Congress and feels she “gets to cover everything. When you report on Wall Street and health care reform…what could be more relevant to people’s lives?” she says.
Over the years, Bash has covered the Bush White House during the war in Iraq, traveled the world with the former president covering summits from Asia to the Middle East, conducted lengthy interviews with Sen. John McCain during the 2008 election and experienced many “pinch-myself moments, where I have a front-row seat to history,” she says.
A self-described “adrenaline junkie” who sometimes works 17-hour days, Bash credits her success to multiple mentors, a willingness to perform any task and simple perseverance. “I just kept raising my hand, volunteering to do things that went beyond my job description,” she says of starting out working in CNN’s tape library in 1993.
Bash also acknowledges a debt to her father, an ABC news producer who took his children to work with him. (Her father retired last year after 41 years with the network.) “Some of my most vivid childhood memories are being in the control room with my dad or wandering around the smoky newsroom,” she says.
Raised in Montvale, N.J., Bash grew up “with an enormously strong Jewish identity” and can still remember all the songs she learned at her UAHC summer camp. Her mother, who has a master’s degree in Judaic studies from Hebrew Union College, and her grandfather, who escaped the Nazis, also proved to
be formative Jewish influences. “Judaism is such a huge part of who I am,” she says, noting that her husband and CNN colleague, John King, converted to Judaism for that reason.
As a kid, Bash resisted the idea of one day working in television. At George Washington University, she majored in political communications and considered applying to law school before securing internships in television news and “loving it. It was always in my blood,” she concedes.
Bash also never imagined she would one day wind up in front of the camera. When offered the job as an on-air reporter in 2002, “I wasn’t sure if I should take it. I stunk at first, but I learned how important it is to always be prepared,” she says. Speaking from personal experience, Bash observes that “gender is still an issue” for women in television, especially in the area of personal appearance. “If you’re a woman, you’re under so much more scrutiny if your hair is sticking out…all you can do is try not to take that stuff personally.”
Ultimately, Bash says, she feels extremely grateful that she’s only had one employer throughout her entire career. “I’ve only worked for CNN, and that’s unheard of in my business,” she says. “I truly love what I do and I just continue to take things one step at a time.”