ABC News White House Correspondent Ann Compton will come back on Sunday Feb 7th to where she honed her journalistic skills, as the keynote speaker for “History is Served” at the Hotel Roanoke. The fourth annual event includes a luncheon, live music and a silent auction; it is a fundraiser for the History Museum of Western Virginia. Compton was a student at Hollins College, now Hollins University, and completed an internship at WDBJ7 in Roanoke.
“It really kind of was a graduate degree in broadcasting and journalism on the streets of Roanoke,” said Compton by phone earlier this week. Back then she covered redistricting fights and annexation battles, fires and local government.
After graduation she was the first female reporter hired at WDBJ. “It was a time when women were just beginning to get the good reporting jobs all across the country.” She spent three years there, establishing the State Capitol Bureau in Richmond. Compton joined ABC News in Washington and later became the first female and youngest person to cover the White House full time for network TV. She was also the only broadcast reporter on Air Force One along with President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, as the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks became known.
Compton says the internet has changed media the most in the 30 plus years since she left Roanoke. The big names, the Walter Cronkites and the Huntley/Brinkleys of journalism are gone. At the Sunday luncheon, she’ll talk about how journalism has changed, not only for women, but for everyone, “and how so much of what we hear now and see now is really in the hands of almost ‘citizen journalists.’”
Compton does have a warning: “there is a danger in citizen journalism. It is done by people who don’t necessarily adhere to the kind of standards that we’ve always thought of mainstream journalism — checking your sources, being very sure of what you’re writing, being very sure (of) the consequences of what you’re publishing.” She says while that’s one of the downsides, the upside is that listeners, readers, and viewers get a fresh perspective.
“It doesn’t mean mainstream journalists will soon be unemployed, but that Americans pick and choose their news sources sometimes,” she says, “for political reasons.”
“Are there people who have begun to watch FOX Cable News channel, which has some wonderful reporters and excellent editors, but it is perceived to have a political point of view? At the same [time], I think there are people who maybe flock to CNN News believing it has a point of view. And if we only go to where we kind of like or feel in a comfort zone on political views, isn’t there a lot out there that we’re missing?”
(See www.history-museum.org or call (540) 224-1229 for more on this weekend’s event, which is subject to change due to weather conditions.)
By Beverly Amsler [email protected]