Word: woodruff
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...most of the public, and probably to many of her colleagues, Woodruff took a big step down. But as she contends in her newly published autobiography, "This Is Judy Woodruff at the White House " (Addison-Wesley; $12.95), covering her beat can be a stunted form of journalism. For a TV network reporter, who needs to worry about pictures at the expense of time for briefing and nuance, the problems are especially acute. Woodruff particularly chafed at "staging stakeouts along the White House driveway in boiling heat or pouring rain or sub-zero dawn, never knowing when a news subject...
...Judy Woodruff leads one of the most glamorous lives in Washington. As a White House correspondent for NBC television, she has waltzed at state dinners, traveled with Presidents to New Delhi and Versailles. Acclaim has gilded every aspect of her life. Like many working mothers, Woodruff, 35, brought her infant son Jeffrey to the office one day; unlike other mothers, she was summoned to see President Reagan, who spent ten minutes bouncing the baby and chanting nursery rhymes...
...when excitement settles into a familiar routine, even the most thrilling assignment becomes just a job. The White House beat, for all its glories, is often repetitive and tedious, the equivalent of covering a fenced-off headquarters in a company town. Says Woodruff: "Access is very tightly controlled; inevitably, you are manipulated. You rarely see your sources. You wait for them to return phone calls." Last week, weary of it all after nearly six years, Woodruff gave up her coveted job to become a Washington-based reporter and interviewer for the morning news show Today...
Even worse were the hours spent following Presidents Carter and Reagan to functions devoid of news value, just in case something catastrophic might happen. Says Woodruff: "The practice is sometimes referred to ghoulishly as 'the death watch.' " When a crisis actually erupted, Woodruff was sometimes turned into a sort of impromptu anchor, transmitting information from other NBC reporters rather than going after it. Although she was an eyewitness to the attempted assassination of President Reagan, once she had scrambled back to the White House she spent most of the rest of the afternoon rooted to one spot, facing...
That kind of "reporting" often prompts print reporters to dismiss their broadcast colleagues as "talking hairdos." Admits Woodruff, who zoomed up in eight years from cleaning film and clipping articles at an Atlanta TV station to covering the President: "From my first reporting job on, I found people were not inclined to take me seriously because I was a woman and because I had never worked for a newspaper." A senior White House aide describes Woodruff as "always a lady," not necessarily regarding that as an asset: "She seems uncomfortable trying to dig out a story, almost timid...