#AskNewser: Erin Burnett, Margaret Brennan, Laura Ingraham, Jon Karl and Many Others Discuss Overcoming On-Air Challenges in 2023

For the first installment of the 2023 year-end #AskNewser series, we caught up with several broadcast and cable news presidents about the state of their respective networks. The second and third installments feature broadcast and cable news hosts and anchors filling us in on what they considered their toughest on-air challenges in 2023 and how they expect to their respective shows to evolve in 2024.

This year, we caught up with ABC News chief Washington correspondent and This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl, as well as ABC 20/20 co-anchor Deborah Roberts; CBS Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan along with streaming anchor and national correspondent Lilia Luciano; PBS NewsHour co-anchors Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett; Fox News’ America’s Newsroom co-anchor Bill Hemmer, The Ingraham Angle Laura Ingraham, along with Fox Business hosts Liz Claman (The Claman Countdown) and Brian Brenberg (The Big Money Show); CNBC Squawk on the Street & Money Movers co-anchor Sara Eisen, CNBC Worldwide Exchange anchor, transports and tech correspondent Frank Holland; Bloomberg TV chief Washington correspondent and Balance of Power co-anchor Annmarie Hordern, Bloomberg Technology co-anchor Caroline Hyde; CNN Early Start & CNNI State of the Race host Kasie Hunt and Erin Burnett Outfront host Erin Burnett, NewsNation Banfield host Ashleigh Banfield NewsNation Now anchor Connell McShane; and Scripps News deputy political director Joe St. George.

When discussing most significant on air challenges in 2023, global events were cited frequently: Daily coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Here’s what they had to say:

TVNewser: What was your most significant on-air challenge this year, and how did you tackle it?

Banfield: Without question the most significant challenge this year was the decision to go 100% off-script. It takes guts to steel to sign onto a live show, staring into a blank camera lens….and continue for one hour with nothing on the Teleprompter. But the product that results is infinitely superior …and well worth the grit that’s required to jump off that cliff!

Bennett: Every news organization faced the same formidable task this year: covering simultaneous conflicts around the world — from the Israel-Hamas war to the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our stellar foreign affairs team and relentless correspondents Nick Schifrin, Leila Molana-Allen, and Jane Ferguson provided on-the-ground coverage that was as nuanced as it was unflinching. Here at home, it was a year when the unprecedented became the routine in our politics. Correspondents Lisa Desjardins and Laura Barrón-López tracked the chaotic search for a new House speaker and the cascading legal peril facing Donald Trump as he cemented his front-runner status for the GOP nomination. I’m proud that the NewsHour consistently met the moment with reliable reporting, solid storytelling, and sharp analysis of the day’s news and events. The stakes have never been higher, and our work as journalists has never been as important.

Brenberg: Launching a new show requires getting your hands around many variables at once. And those variables multiply when it’s an ensemble format. Amidst all the change and adaptation, the challenge on air is to stay committed to building the co-host relationships that give the show its tone and personality. We’ve been given the space to do that, and we’ve tried to be very intentional about taking advantage of that space. Check out our “co-host quiz” on Brian Kilmeade‘s One Nation and you’ll see what I mean! The good news is, it’s bearing fruit. We’re encouraged to see and feel the vitality of those relationships show up on air.

Brennan: The biggest challenge—one we welcome—is shifting through the flood of headlines and political noise to focus on the substance for our hour each week. We’re in a moment where the amount of change to our political system, our economy, and our globe can be disorienting and overwhelming for all of us. We try to focus in on what events during each week mean to the bigger picture of how we live and are governed. In the past year, geopolitical risk has skyrocketed with the recent war in the Middle East, the ongoing war in Europe, and the concerns of an increasingly aggressive China. National security topics are more important than ever. Our economy is recovering at home but big changes to our workforce and industries are remaking how everyday people experience that economy. The rise of AI, automation, and efforts to be more climate friendly have majorly impacted the labor force in the entertainment, news, auto industries and tech which has spillover efforts in the political space. We’ve seen the largest migration crisis to date in our hemisphere and we’ve looked at the climate and economic factors feeding into it, the logjam in Congress when it comes to rewriting migration laws, and the impact in border towns and now big cities across the country from having this flood of humanity arrive on their doorsteps. So many of these news events are intertwined. This is why research and being read in on a variety of topics is important to me and to the team.

Politics is about people at the end of the day. It’s all connected. We’ve tried to meet this moment with top notch bookings of the policy makers and big thinkers who can help navigate all of this change. I’m grateful for the hardworking team at “Face the Nation” that gets us in good shape for every Sunday morning.

Burnett: I am grateful to have spent time in Ukraine and Israel this year. And one of the hardest events I’ve covered was the Hamas terror attack on Israel.

The grief and shock of survivors and parents of hostages in the weeks after the attack when I was in Israel was a raw suffering impossible to truly comprehend. There were moments: listening to a father who found out his daughter was dead hours before and interviewing him at his home as friends and family gathered to sit shiva. Listening to a father whose wife and toddlers were hostage while we sat in his girls’ playroom – it seemed then that holding hope for their survival was denial. Listening to the parents of two teenage siblings who chose to play the phone call of their daughter saying in terror and panic that she was shot.  Her father cried and tossed the phone. Her mother had not heard the call until that moment; she covered her mouth with an emotion I can’t accurately capture.

In these moments I served a purpose for these families. CNN could help bring their loss and anguish to the world. Personally, though, I felt almost like a trespasser. Sitting in these families homes, their bedrooms…we were ourselves crying. Yet it was not our grief. Sometimes I was unsure when to meet their eyes, it was their deep personal sea of grief and I wanted to respect them. These were some of the hardest moments.

Since then, there has been news of incredible relief for some of these families. The toddler girls and their mother are home.  The teenage siblings are home.  Their parents showed strength no person should ever have to find. But they did and I will never forget those moments with them.

Claman: As the anchor of the final hour of stock market trade, my ‘forever goal’ is to give viewers the most important business news and the newsmakers behind it driving the market action.

But the challenge comes when the line between financial news and breaking global events becomes blurred, and balancing the urgency of that breaking news with the need to provide comprehensive business analysis requires a delicate dance.

Some stories are so important, it’s ridiculous to try and put a ‘business news spin’ to them.

The Hamas terror attack on Israel October 7th was clearly that kind of story.

For the first two weeks following the attack, we decided to start the show each day with an umbrella lead, using split screens of the markets paired with live feeds we were getting from the Fox News Jerusalem bureau of the missile showers from Gaza to Israel, and Israel’s Iron Dome defense system response. We also reserved a block in the show every day for live reports from Fox News reporters on the scene and military analysis.

While fully committed to covering the story, we began to focus on business leaders who either rushed to the region or were outspoken about the situation. Some had operations in Israel, while others felt it was such an existential moment for Israel and the Jewish people that they traveled there to show support.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger came on and talked about the 20,000 workers and contractors he called “souls” the semiconductor giant employs in Herzliya, a city just north of Tel Aviv. 17% of the workforce has been called up to serve, and some employees were killed.

Irwin Simon, the CEO of cannabis company Tilray, spoke powerfully of his trip to the Kittbutz Hamas attacked and torched, and the images of the slaughter aftermath he said he will never forget.

When anti-semitic incidents at American college campuses began to proliferate, we then focused on business leaders who were using their ‘dollar vote’ by pulling their donations to their alma maters.

We invited billionaire investor and Columbia University alum Leon Cooperman on the show. During the live interview, he announced he would stop all future donations to his alma mater Columbia after its president remained silent as tenured professor Joseph Mahmoud described the slaughter of 1200 Israelis by Hamas as “innovative.”

Alex Karp, the CEO of data aggregator Palantir which has contracts with the US and Israeli governments among others, came on and in no uncertain terms ripped Ivy League presidents for refusing to condemn Jewish genocide rhetoric on their campuses “while restricting every form of free speech over the last 20 years.’

It’s a constant work in progress but we feel we’re navigating through the challenge of covering the story by staying true to our DNA as a business news show.

Eisen: My most significant on-air challenge this year turned out to be one of my best. I had the privilege of moderating an hour and a half panel with the four most powerful central bankers in the world, which CNBC and other networks took live on air. Fed Chair Jay Powell, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda. That’s a lot of intellectual firepower and heft! I felt a lot of pressure to conduct a smart and engaging conversation while keeping it entertaining, thought provoking for the audience and hopefully market moving as well. I approached it by doing a ton of homework, relying on my passion and confidence in my macroeconomics background and I just enjoyed every second of it.

Hemmer: To do the job right, you need to know the details. And the details from the Hamas attacks in Israel are brutal. We have met and spoken with countless families who had no idea if their son or daughter, mother or father was dead or alive. That’s difficult. They have amazing strength. They show courage and determination and it always strikes me as emotionally powerful. We are human beings. It can affect us deeply.

Holland: The biggest challenge on air this year was covering AI, keeping the developments and what it could mean for many stocks in context. It’s a very exciting development and has sparked a lot of investor enthusiasm. But our coverage also needs to go beyond headlines and hype to give investors real insight. We have focused on drilling down on exactly what companies and/or products do and taking it a step beyond just saying “they use AI”.

Hordern: We’re always trying to think of the smartest approaches in explaining the chaos of Washington to our data-oriented Bloomberg audience. It’s been a tumultuous and drama-ridden year in Washington and the political gamesmanship can be vexing to global market-watchers and dealmakers.

Hunt: This year I launched a brand new show on CNN International and CNN Max, and re-launched Early Start. Honestly, both projects were so much fun – but I’ve never done two at once! Each show has a distinctive identity and a separate team pulling it together. My early morning show has a wider lens: Every morning we do weather, sports and a global analysis segment from London in addition to news of day and a regular focus on Capitol Hill and politics. We’ve put the emphasis on more live guests, always a regular challenge at 5 a.m., but it’s clear people have started to see it as a place for smart news and analysis to get a jump on the day. And on State of the Race, we built a panel show aimed at covering the 2024 election that reaches both a global and domestic audience. We have focused on finding the right mix of voices and making sure we regularly have strong newsmaker interviews. The teams working on both of these shows have done so much great work in an incredibly short period of time, and I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to accomplish in just a few short months (both launched this fall). I’ll be grateful for some rest over the holidays!

Hyde: Challenges are of course opportunities – and ours was telling the story of AI’s risks and rewards in as many ways possible for our TV audience. We therefore pushed daily to have the right guests on to answer the right questions about the speed of innovation. The topic provided extraordinary business stories, personalities and industry disruption. I’m proud to say the team at Bloomberg Technology was able to drive as well as capitalize on the never ending global headlines in AI, and tell the story in diverse ways, with diverse guests and thoughts across our show and social and digital output. And we had a blast doing it.

Ingraham: Americans are so fed up with both political parties that I understand the impulse on the part of some to simply tune out politics altogether. But we close our eyes at our own peril.  On the Angle, with humor and substance, we demonstrate how critically important it is for all of us to remain engaged in the battle of ideas.  In the end, the only way to save America is for a critical mass of citizens to be informed, engaged and energized to fight to preserve our freedoms and traditions.

Karl: The biggest challenge this year is also one of the biggest challenges of our time for journalists: Pursuing the truth when disinformation and misinformation are as widespread as ever. This is an especially big challenge when a leading presidential candidate habitually uses rhetoric than can be both hateful and dangerous.

Luciano: This year I have traveled around the country and the world to tell stories of people coming to terms with the unthinkable. I have sat before more parents than I can count as they step into the initial steps of unspeakable grief after losing their children. From a family of migrants who like millions in Latin America left everyone they knew and everything they owned behind forced by poverty, political persecution or even climate change onto an involuntary and life-threatening journey—only to lose their young child in the custody of Border Patrol when they thought they had made it to the safety of the United States.

I sat in a little girl’s room as she described the compounding trauma along with the sounds, smells and fears that haunt her every day one year after surviving a school shooting that took her brother’s life. I listened to a mother describing the state of her son’s charred remains as she found and carried them days after he died in a historic wildfire where authorities failed to sound the timely alarms that may have saved him. In Ecuador, I covered the assassination of a Presidential candidate who had dared to speak out against the drug gangs which silenced everyone else. In Israel, I listened to the desperate pleas of parents and children awaiting the release of their loved ones. I sat with a brave soldier blowing the whistle on all the ways she and her colleagues, all young women soldiers, had alerted their superiors of an impending attack. She had just been transferred and survived the attack that killed her friends. Though we could not enter Gaza to tell the stories of civilians killed, injured, and displaced, I gathered the story of a pair of brothers who had an entire community in the United States come together to provide a life-saving surgery they needed in America, only to learn they were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

It’s impossible to ask people to open their wounds and show you the extent of their pain in the face of tragedy. And yet, they do. They welcome us into their homes, they offer us tea and they ask without words, in the tired look in their eyes that we tell a story which will save the next person from enduring the pain they feel.

The hardest challenge every year is to trust that the work we do, the stories we tell will create an openness and awaken the humanity in the people listening and watching our stories. It’s a heavy challenge to carry the conviction that our stories can do something to bridge the fast-growing chasm that exists between us.

McShane: NewsNation came to me and offered me the opportunity to host a fact-based, unbiased news show for two hours every weekday. That was, by definition, the biggest on-air challenge I faced this year. Two hours is a lot! So far, so good. I would say I tackled it head-on, but not alone. We have a great team with people like James Holm and Claudine Cleophat leading the way. We really think we’re tapping into something new, unique, and important. I hope we’re right.

Nawaz: Finding a way to fit the flood of news into one show every night. There were tough decisions every day. As journalists, it’s a good problem to have. But even without a  major election to cover, there was no shortage of stories. This will only get harder next year.

Roberts: My most difficult challenge this year was about staying centered and focused while dealing with my husband’s catastrophic health battle. Fortunately, my ABC colleagues were so very supportive. But never before have I had to dig so deep to bring my full self to work while being distracted during Al’s recovery. Thankfully, my assignments brought a welcome respite from the worry and exhaustion.  What a difference a year makes!

St. George: I think the biggest challenge of 2023 was just the sheer volume of news. The year before an election year isn’t usually this busy politically.

I remember going into 2023 thinking Congress was going to be a boring beat in 2023, maybe a big debate over the debt limit, but that’s it. Boy was I wrong. From a historical battle to elect a speaker to a historic removal of speaker to debates over Israel and Gaza, Ukraine, the border and, of course, George Santos, the political beat at the Capitol led many of our newscasts at Scripps News.

Of course, we had campaigns for the White House to cover, historic opinions at the Supreme Court, like student loan forgiveness, and did I mention multiple indictments of a former president? 2023 was wild. Covering major news requires major logistics. For instance, somebody had to reserve that balcony to anchor coverage from the first debate in Wisconsin or buy that rain tent so in Miami our reporters and anchors didn’t get poured on during Trump arraignment coverage.

You tackle it by reminding yourself that it is an honor to play a small part in documenting history, and you rely on many talented teammates to make it all work.