Abby Phillip Is Bringing Empathy to Cable News
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Abby Phillip wishes she knew, when she was starting out, that there was more than one way to be a journalist. You know the type—the television anchor with bombastic energy who loves the camera. “There are a lot of personalities in television who want to be famous and want to be seen,” the CNN anchor says. “I am not that person.”
Nor does she want to be. If you’ve had the pleasure of witnessing Phillip’s calm and cool demeanor when she’s onscreen—now as the newly appointed anchor of the prime-time show CNN NewsNight With Abby Phillip—you’ll know that she occupies an entirely different lane. But staying true to herself didn’t always come easy. “I spent a lot of years in the early part of my career comparing myself to others in ways that didn’t reflect my core strengths,” she says. “I learned some years in that I could lean into my ability, bring empathy to journalism, and offer something useful to the audience. If I had known that earlier, I would’ve spent more time nurturing that part of myself.”
Since bursting onto the scene in 2017 when she joined CNN to help cover the Trump administration, Phillip has become known for her thoughtful and sincere approach to delivering the news. One way she’s done this is by being vulnerable and transparent with her audience. Most recently, she opened up in a CNN episode of The Whole Story With Anderson Cooper, “Homebirth Journey: Saving Black Moms,” about her decision to have a home birth, under the care of a midwife and doula, after experiencing negligent care early on in her pregnancy. Phillip tells me about one appointment where she was left sitting in the waiting room because her doctor never showed up. “I was uncertain about what to do and a little afraid, and I felt really dismissed,” she says. She wasn’t wrong to feel scared: According to the CDC, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women. And one of the contributing factors is “variation in quality health care.”
For Phillip, using her platform to raise awareness of the Black maternal health crisis was a no-brainer. “There’s so much stigma around talking about alternative childbirth experiences, but I had to [summon] the courage to put it out there because it’s not just me,” Phillip says. “When I was pregnant, I didn’t know anything about childbirth, and the more I learned, the more terrified I became. That fear was so disempowering and so debilitating. I couldn’t enjoy my pregnancy as much as I wanted to. The documentary was a little bit of a parallel journey to how I went from anxiety to feeling empowered and hopeful about my own experience in childbirth. I wanted that for other women. And the more that we know, the better we can be at protecting ourselves and making the right decisions for ourselves.” The response, she says, “has been really overwhelming. Every single week, at least one or two people reach out to me to say that they had similar experiences, or that they learned so much, or that I helped them realize that they could ask different questions.”
As she gears up for the chaos of this year’s election cycle, forging this genuine connection with viewers is Phillip’s “North Star.” “I spend way more time thinking about whether I served people who are sitting at home than whether or not my peers in Washington or New York care or like what I do,” she says. “That’s liberating.”
On owning who you are
“You can look at the people who are at the top of their game and come away thinking, if I don’t do it like them, then it’s not the right way to do it. But the truth is that every person has a different strength that they bring to the table. I got lucky that I was able to just dive into my career practically the day after graduating from college. I felt underprepared and out of my element. But the reality is that there’s only really one way to get better at this craft, and that is to do it. And in the process of doing it, zero in on what you are good at and what you enjoy doing, and build your strengths as much as possible so that you can own who you are as a journalist, even if it’s different from what has worked for other people.”
On her biggest goal for her career
“My biggest goal is to be known and trusted for telling people the truth. All we have in this business is our reputation, and that’s always been a guiding light for me.”
On feeling confident in front of the camera
“When I first got to CNN, which was my first job on air in television, I wasn’t convinced that this was the role for me. I didn’t like being on TV. I mean, honestly, I still don’t. The being on TV part of it is not the part that I care the most about. I love doing the journalism, but I could be doing it on the radio and it would be fine. I don’t have this natural desire to be seen. But one of the things about doing this, for the time that I’ve been doing it, is that you forget about the camera part of it because what’s happening in the conversation is what’s most important. And when people feel like there is not a camera between you and them and that they are in the room with you in a way, that is when you produce, I think, the best TV.
“But I 100 percent feel confident in what I’m doing right now because I’ve worked really hard to show up as me, and people have responded to that, and that’s been great. If they hadn’t, fine. But I think they have. The audience is not looking for a performance. You’re not an actor. They’re looking for a connection, and that’s what we’re trying to do every day.”
On sharing evening news hours with Laura Coates
“It is so cool to be able to hand over to her at 11:00. Sometimes in journalism, it’s like there can only be one Black woman every six hours or something, per network. And the fact that that is not the case is so great and so normal, and that is 100 percent the way that it should be. It should be totally unremarkable. But Laura is also a friend. I consider myself a Laura Coates superfan, and I just think she’s the smartest legal mind around. The biggest compliment that a person in TV can give you is that when someone else is on TV, you actually turn up the volume instead of muting it. Laura is someone I always turn up the volume for. So I love that we get to do this back-to-back and we get to anchor together a lot. We’ve got a great rapport and a great friendship. And I think it’s a moment for the TV business and for CNN, but I just want to normalize it. I just want it to be something that’s not remarked upon, because it shouldn’t be remarkable that you have two Black women on a network.”
On her biggest professional accomplishment
“One of my proudest professional moments was moderating a presidential debate. It was something that came out of nowhere, but was a huge professional milestone in a lot of ways, and it kicked off a major new phase of my career. When I look back on my career, hopefully, it’s the first of many.”
A version of this article appears in the April 2024 issue of ELLE.
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