And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, The Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.
Kasie Hunt is one of the great young political journalists in America. She brings to her shows on CNN and CNN International the savvy of a veteran who spent years covering Capitol Hill. She knows the players and she knows the country. I wanted to talk about that, but I wanted to sit down with her for another reason as well, to talk about a medical crisis she endured that caused her to reorder her priorities. Here's that conversation. Kasie Hunt, my friend. It's good to see you.
Wonderful to see you, David.
Thank you for for doing this. I'm a big admirer of yours as a journalist and as a, particular as a political observer. You're a. A hack at heart, an enthusiast which.
I'm so touched and kind of awed that you would say that.
I don't I don't bestow that on everyone, you know.
That means the world actually. Truly, you are one of the greats. And I can't imagine you'd have ever said that about me. So thank you.
But now I'm interested in talking about you for a little bit before we talk about this very, very weighty and kind of crazy election. But yeah, and as I look into your history, I knew a little bit. I didn't realize that this is a classic story of someone coming from the right side of the tracks, literally the right side of the tracks, the Main Line of Philly, the suburbs.
The Upper Main Line, to be clear.
Okay. Make the distinction. Talk about Wayne, Pennsylvania.
'Sure. Well, I used to joke sometimes. It's a very well-to-do area, as you know. But, you know, my family is not from there originally, which is where, you know, a lot of the sort of right side of the tracks thinking would come from. I sometimes joke you'll find maybe a Ferrari dealership on the actual Main Line. We've got the Lexus dealerships on the Upper Main Line, but everybody's there to use the really good public schools instead of going to the very, very well-to-do and very, very good private schools on the Lower Main Line. But it was a really lovely place to grow up. I mean, suburban Philadelphia is just, it's idyllic. I mean, the roads were horse cart paths and the forests are beautiful. And I grew up right down the street from Valley Forge Park. And, you know, I had a great family growing up. I, one sister, my mom and dad. My dad worked for, we moved there, was he was working for Unisys. My my mom's family's from Michigan originally, which was where I was born and where where, you know, our our family still is in large part, but that's where I grew up. And it was a really nice place to grow up. I did spend probably too much time at the King of Prussia mall because that was, you know, the 90s were the era of the mall hangout for teenagers and yeah, that was ours.
Did you guys talk about politics, talk about news around your house? Tell me about how that became an interest.
I didn't realize we were going to be doing this. I love this. So we didn't not talk about politics for sure. It was something that I was, I have always been interested in, especially the news. Like as long as I can remember. Why, I, you know, I'm not sure. I think it's this thing where I always wanted to know more than everybody else. I wanted to be. There was a little bit of a competitiveness to it. I'm a pretty competitive person. I always have been. But I remember that in fourth grade they finally started letting us do what they called current events, right? There would be current events conversations. And I remember that year, actually, was the Oklahoma City bombing. And I remember taking the photograph of the firefighter with the child in his arms, you know, into into the class, into the classroom and having it be a subject of consternation that I had done that. But my parents, when I was young, bought for me, because I wanted one, a subscription to Time magazine, which the news weeklies were huge at the time, because obviously this was before the Internet became a household thing and you couldn't. We could get the Philadelphia Enquirer delivered, which we did, I think, on the weekends. But I remember waiting every week for Time.
It was, yeah, it really was. I remember waiting for for Time in particular to show up every week and then just kind of devouring it from cover to cover.
So what grade were you in when you brought in the picture from the Oklahoma City bombing?
How does a kid in fourth grade process something like that?
You know, I think that's part of why it's still is something that sticks out to me. It's a relatively early memory that I have of news, because it was something that was so difficult. And I think when I was younger I had an easier time, or at least I thought I had an easier time, processing some stories like that. And then you grow up and you suddenly start to realize what what those things actually mean and it becomes harder to deal with.
I read somewhere that you, that 9/11 had a big.
Impact on you. You were a senior in high school at the time. It pains me to say that.
So it pains you to say that, David, I mean, I have to say this is one of the things that is first, you know I'm, I'm not yet 40, I'm 39. And so I'm still young. I mean, I think I'm young.
You are. Let me certify that.
But there are now. I remember it was some years ago now that there was a tour group at the Capitol. And most of these kids come when they're in eighth grade. I worked on Capitol Hill for a long time as a reporter, and the kids were looking at one of the statue displays and saying to the the docent, the tour guide, that they don't remember, they didn't remember 9/11. Right. It, for them it was history. And that for me was one of the first moments where I realized like, wow, there's I have I have grown and aged into a place that is different from the people who had come before. Because for me, for such a long time 9/11 was something that unified literally everyone that was alive as this sort of incredibly difficult moment in our history that kind of changed everything. And I think for me, because it was my junior year in high school, it's a really formative time in anybody's life. And so for that to happen right as I was coming of age, you know, I remember I was in Spanish class my junior year and they, you know, come over the loudspeaker and they say that one of the towers has fallen and class continued after that. But then onem one of my friends had a grandfather who worked at the towers every day. She was my best friend. And if my memory serves, she was in the class with me. I think we were in that same class. If we weren't, either way, somehow we found our way together and we had gone down to the main guidance office because she wanted to call her family to try to see. And then we were standing there and watching TV when the second tower hit. So, you know, at that age and, you know.
'Well, luckily, he had not, he had either not gone to the office that day or like it was, it was discovered fairly quickly that her grandfather, who was actually a very remarkable man, he was involved in the development of the nuclear technology in the 1940s, was a scientist, but he he was not there at the time, which we were able to find out pretty quickly. And we didn't really have anyone in our immediate community who--actually, I may be misspeaking. There may have been someone in our immediate community who lost somebody that day. But either way, it was a very dramatic kind of moment. And I think also there was this specter of war, right, that very quickly loomed. And when you're young and you know, that's who fights our wars, right? Young men. It became very much a focus for many of, for all of us, really.
And you you were glued to the coverage of that.
I watched it. Yeah. I mean, we went home early from school that day and I watched, I believe, I'm I'm sure I was watching CNN that day just endlessly, you know, from from beginning to end.
And you're not you're saying that because you work for CNN?
I'm not. No, I'm not. It was, you know, it was just one of those moments. I mean and I mean, now that I do know, now that I do work at CNN, I have an even deeper understanding of this. But when something like this happens to all of us, when there is a thing that happens to us, that's one of the first things you often do is turn on CNN.
Yeah, No, I think it's a great strength of of CNN, not to pile on here. But you gave a speech at maybe your high school graduation.
And it was called Our Challenge, Our Turn.
Where did you find this, David? You're excavating.
I've got. I've got great people. So what was that? Was. Was it related to the 9/11 thing or what was the gist of that?
So that that speech. And so. That graduation speech, it would have been in 2003. So it was a couple of years after 9/11. I don't remember how much I touched on 9/11 in the speech directly. But I do know that I did in that it was a speech about history. So the sort of device I used in that speech is that my mother, my grandfather, my grandmother, and I were all born exactly 30 years apart. So my grandmother was 30 years old when my mother was born. And I was and my mother was thirty years old when I was born. And they each, you know, sort of had their own kind of era of historical challenges. And my my grandmother obviously is part of the World War Two generation, the greatest generation. My grandfather, who she married after the war, was 19 in '44. Got drafted, went over one ridge in the Pacific, got shot and came back out. So he earned a Purple Heart and she was mostly at home, but did also, you know, women played kind of remarkable roles on the home front during the war. So she, that was kind of her challenge. That was what I, I talked about there. And then my mom was was a little bit later. There was obviously the Vietnam era. She graduated from high school in 1972, I believe. It may have been 73.
Is she? Yes. She graduated from Dearborn High School. My grandfather had worked for General Motors. And and so she, you know, that was clearly something that was a big part of kind of that era. The country had been very divided, right, in the 60s. And then we were now facing, I mean. And and if you think about, like, and I think about this a lot today, actually, the years in which I was a child and growing up were very sort of prosperous, you know, years where people stepped back and kind of enjoyed what was going on. It was a a.
Little bit like the postwar period.
Well, it was a postwar period, because it was the post Soviet period when we thought, right, you know, the world had changed forever.
People were writing about the end of history. Right. The the currency, you know, divides in Europe were falling. Europe was unifying. There was this sense that you could kind of go anywhere and do anything and that everything was always going to be good. Right. And that it's just remarkable to see the degree to which that is true. And that's a little bit about what the speech was about, because 9/11 really was a puncture moment for that, for that sense of security that we had all grown up with that we never thought would be punctured.
Now, you went to George Washington University and you went to study foreign policy, national security. Was it your thought that you were going to go into that and was that part of that?
Yeah, it was absolutely part of it. I mean, and that's why, you know, I actually ended up choosing between GW and the University of Michigan. There are definitely times when I think, I really missed out and I go to the University of Michigan and seen all those games at the Big House.
Yeah. But you know what? It worked out well for me, and the reason that I ended up at GW was because I knew I wanted to be part of whatever it was our national life was going to be, right. The things that were happening in the world, the current events that I wanted to read about, like, I wanted to be part of it. I wasn't exactly sure how or what it was going to look like. I just knew that I couldn't look away and I didn't want to be outside of what was going on. So I came here. I studied international relations. The war in Iraq was launched the year that I graduated from high school in 2003. So that was a very animating debate again, for all of those reasons, because it would be the young men that would fight our wars. And ultimately I would go on when I was in graduate school to be very well acquainted with a number of people who served in our armed forces and end up having friends who lost, you know, we lost lost friends, you know, lost limbs, all of those things. Right. I mean, it it's very much that the generation of people that fought those wars are very much people that are my contemporaries and who kind of bore the the damage of that. So I, you know, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do exactly. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to work for the State Department or what, but I knew that I wanted to study what was going on in the world beyond us. So that's what I came to college to do. And I didn't. I, I toyed with maybe, well, maybe I want to be a war correspondent or something like that along those lines. But it ended. I ended up being just a little bit too young for that, right? And then I ended up covering getting assigned to cover presidential campaign.
Well, you did a couple of internships, right? In journalism in in college.
Yeah. So I, I actually I worked briefly for Voice of America. My aunt had worked for Voice of America, which is obviously very international focused, which I enjoyed. And then I my resume, I got picked out of a pile, which I'm still kind of remarkably, I'm still kind of amazed about to this day at NBC News. And that was my first kind of like full time internship in politics. And I worked with a couple of people who are still. Mark Murray is still out there, who's a dear friend, and he.
Was a great fellow at the University of Chicago.
Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah. So Mark hired me at NBC and I worked with him. It was a very sad election season. It was 2005, so right after a presidential election. We had we had an election in Virginia, an election in New Jersey, and that was about it. But he taught me a ton. Had me reading the Des Moines Register every morning. And you know, I was working on First Read, which was an early morning product. I was getting up at. It was it was practice for what I do now. I was getting up at 430, 5:00 to like get the Metro to get to Nebraska Avenue and in Washington by seven in the morning.
And what energized you about about journalism?
Again, I think it's this the thing about journalism that I love is chasing the story, like finding out what is going on and figuring, figuring it out before anyone else is as a bonus. But sort of there is an adrenaline rush to it when it works. I mean, you know, you were a reporter.
Yeah, I'm feeling you right now.
And it's like of all the things, you know, as much as, you know, TV has many trappings and I'm very happy to be in television where I am now, but it's really the news part of it that is the sort of animating thing for me. And it's part of why.
You know, that's one of the things I wanted to ask you because you went off to get a master's degree.
In Britain. In sociology?
Which seems like a divergence from this path. Unless you were planning to hang a shingle as a sociologist.
Well, so it's a little complicated. Basically, the way that the universities over there work. I found there was an adviser in the sociology department who was going to supervise. I was going to study the way that social media in particular was putting fuel to the fire of extremist groups, particularly terrorist groups. So that was what I, so the way, that just happened to go into the sociology department, right, like I'd study at that university.
The woman that, the adviser that that that bought my thesis actually ended up going on maternity leave. And I ended up with a different advisor and I ended up writing about. And to your point about it being a divergence, I, of course, became obsessed with the presidential campaign that's going on in the United States. So I ended up writing about media coverage of Hillary Clinton and how gender in particular impacted, impacted her campaign. And I did a semiotic analysis of the Sunday shows. Now that I understand how the Sunday shows are pulled together, I'm sure I would write it completely differently. But it was an interesting, it was an interesting exercise. And it also it's part of what helped me. I had studied abroad in London when I was in college and just fell in love with. I went to a debate at the Oxford Union and I thought to myself, I have got to come back here. Like this is just something I have to do for myself. I mean, it's just such an incredible place and it was such an incredible life experience to go and do it. And so I had the opportunity to do it. And one of the things I learned was that I didn't I didn't want to get out of the game of being a journalist and covering U.S. politics.
You know, I want to just. I didn't know this about your thesis there. And I want to ask you about it, because it's relevant to what's going on right now. We're in a different place than we were in 2000. And I guess that was 2008.
Yeah, it was the summer of 2008 was when I sent it in. So it was the primaries, basically, that I was looking at.
Yeah. You know what's striking about this campaign is the degree to which Kamala Harris is not leaning into gender, not leaning into her her race. The Hillary Clinton campaign was animated in some ways by the historic nature of her candidacy.
Quite different. So how much did her leaning into it feed the way she was being covered? And how much was she being covered simply because she was the first woman and this was a fascination?
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, look, the 2008 campaign was considerably different than 2016. Right?
Yeah. And the way that, you know, she did it. I was there in 2016. As I covered, I was started on her plane after Bernie Sanders was, it was clear Bernie Sanders wasn't going to going to going to win the Democratic nomination. And so I switched over from him to start to to start covering Hillary's campaign. And she was still doing this in 2016. And I know you were there in 2008 with President, you know, then Senator Obama, who I had gotten to cover very briefly in the Senate. I think that the the main difference, or at least it feels to me like the main difference is, just that there seems to be some. You have to kind of get over this hurdle of having people care first about that. Right. And I think right now, the first thing that people think think about when they think about Kamala Harris is not necessarily that she's a woman. Like there's other things that matter more.
It seems like progress to me. Yeah.
Yeah, that's progress. We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. You came back and you did a series of print jobs. You spent time at the Associated Press, a couple of stints there. You you were Politico. Talk to me about that. About. I'm biased because I love print, because that's what I grew up in. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Talk about, first of all, your experiences as a young reporter. A lot of it on the Hill, right?
Yes, a lot of it. And in fact, that first stint at the Associated Press was after I graduated from college, but before I went to graduate school at Cambridge, I spent a year as what they call, is, you're like you're called an editorial assistant. It's a junior reporting job. And for about half that year I was on the news desk and I it was an incredible way to learn. I did not realize at the time how much I was learning as I was sitting there. But I learned, what I learned was news judgment because I was watching some of the best in the business. And this again, obviously the the Internet has shown up by this point in my life. Right. And in all of our lives. This is 2006. But social media was not yet what it was. The way that information was moving was still much more controlled by large organizations. And the decisions that they made had, I would argue, a larger impact. And so the person that was writing the AP lead every day had an incredible amount of power to shape how things were thought about. And so I got to sit behind Terry Hunt, you probably know, legendary White House reporter for the AP. And basically my job was to be a typist. Right. So the bureau chief at the time was famed for being just insane about how fast you had to type if you had the job that I had. And that was like basically all that mattered. And I was like, This seems ridiculous, silly. Aren't there other things that I? No. It was very important that I, and I learned how to do this as a reporter, got the quote down accurately. And then I knew, based on how fast my fingers could go and whether I could keep up, where the accuracy started and ended. Right. Because eventually you run out of, you know, you're not catching up with someone talking so that I could take that, and when the writer sitting in front of me said, you know, give me the quote on X. There it was. I had it. I didn't have to go back to listen to tape. I knew it was said and.
Type with all your fingers?
'See, I'm an old-style newsman. And so it's like two.
I type really fast. Yeah, I learned kids these days or apparently not taking typing classes. And it's a similar thing. They're like hunting and pecking. I could never do it. Yeah, no, I can.
It's good. Well, it's good. It sounds like it, it was helpful.
It was very helpful. But it also what happened was that I learned how to pick the quote. I learned how to to to start to hear. What was it that Terry was going to ask me for? And and it turned out that that is the job, right? The job is listening.
What is important? What is meaningful? What is news?
Right. What is new? What is different? Why, you know, why does it matter? Because, you know, initially you start to think, well, I've got to get down every single word that this person says. No. A lot of what they say is not important. Your job is to distinguish between what is and what isn't and get that down so I learned how to do that at the AP. And then the second six months I was there, they put me up on the Hill, and it was a heady time because it was the beginning of the campaign. It was the spring of 2007. And so Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Senator McCain.
The place was lousy with candidates.
All running around. It was so much fun.
And you had others, too. Biden, Dodd.
Biden. Dodd. Yes. They were all there, too. Yeah. And it was sort of my first taste of of getting to cover cover the Capitol. And, you know, and I was writing for the wire, so, and I was getting bylines. And, you know, when you write for the wire, it matters. Especially at that time. And so I remember I wrote a story about Nancy Pelosi. There was something about the budget. And I mean, I have never. It's funny because I ended up having a long relationship with the aide who called me and screamed at me because, of course, he was there for many years. I won't name him, but I'm sure if he were to listen to this podcast, he would know exactly who he is, right? So that was my first taste of kind of the impact and the power that you had. I'm thinking like I'm 21 years old, like I can barely drink and like the Speaker of the House is pissed because I wrote something in the newspaper.
That could cause you to drink.
I think it probably did, but yeah, so. So that's where I started, the Hill. And then after I came back from Cambridge, I didn't end up back at the AP until 2012, the presidential cycle in 2011, 2012. But I went to National Journal and and to Politico before that, after I came back. So I covered a little bit, the tail end of the winning Obama campaign, but I didn't cover the Obama White House. I went back up to the Hill and I did cover the passage of Obamacare. And I was also the labor. So I covered health care and labor policy, which when I came back from Cambridge, I was like, man, I got I got very lucky. I got right in under the wire with the recession, right? Like I had a job before the market collapsed. And then no one could get a job in journalism. So I was very, like, remarkable, remarkably lucky timing. But I'm sure you know this very well. I also was very lucky to have this beat where I was like, this seems like, you know, I really want to do politics or international relations or any of things I studied in school, like, health care and labor policy, how dry. It was the best education in covering politics I ever could have had because A. They were passing the Affordable Care Act, right?
Yeah, The politics around that were.
Bananas. And I learned how every single member of the House of Representatives was interpreting the politics in their district to decide, like how Pelosi was going to twist their arms to get them to vote.
You learn about the country.
So much about the country. And then I covered labor, which is fundamentally like, if you understand the politics of labor in this country, you understand, labor and business, so much about, you know, politics of everything. And at the time it was Card Check, which is a bill that, you know, people probably forgotten about, EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act. But it's something that if it were to ever become law, would have this massive impact on this dynamic that has been foundational to our politics for so long. So anyway, I got to learn so much doing that that I rely on quite literally every day.
Yeah. Look, my career as a young political journalist was foundational for everything. Everything.
So talk about the transition from print to broadcast and was it something that you sought to do? Is it something that you wanted to do?
Yes, it was something that I wanted to do. It wasn't something that, well, I guess I should say it wasn't something I didn't want to do. It was never something that I thought was a possibility, because typically the old school way that you would become a TV journalist is to go work in local TV news and kind of work your way up through the various markets. And I'm like, I hadn't done that, right, and I didn't want to do that. I liked covering Washington. I wanted to be in the thick of things and. But that said, I mean, the same sort of drive that I have to try to break news, find the news, is kind of what led me to TV, because I quickly learned that when your sources see you on TV and you say something, if they're, usually when they're unhappy, sometimes when they're happy, but they'll call you when you get off the air and they'll tell you something you didn't know. Right. And so I kind of figured out the power of that. And then I ultimately figured out that you can do it beforehand, right? You can use your TV hit as an excuse to call all your sources and say, hey, I'm going to go talk about this on television. Right. And they've got the they've got the TV on in, you know, the White House offices or their, you know, Capitol Hill office. And they're they're like, you're going to talk about my boss? Well, let me tell you, like, here's what you should say. Another way to learn new stuff. So I started doing that where.
That's where the Capitol Hill thing is just incredibly valuable.
Got a lot of magpies up there.
Yes. 535 people who were just dying to talk to you. Because honestly, I'm. I'm very I'm biased, but I I have done stints at the White House. I have done stints at the White House that are just long enough for me to realize that I never wanted to be a White House reporter full time.
And I was I was, you know, I worked in the White House for a couple of years, and I had the perspective of a person who grew up in journalism. And I always thought it was such a terrible beat, because you're so reliant on kind of the official sort of offerings and, you know, the ability to really do enterprise journalism is less when you're in that. It's important. Yes, it's important. But limiting, I would think.
I covered, I was a city hall bureau chief in Chicago, but I was city hall bureau chief in a really sort of momentous time in Chicago history with a bunch of really colorful characters. And it was, you know, like living in the Front Page era. It was really, really good.
But but the White House is is tough. It's a tough beat.
Yeah. And you're you're stuck in one one place and you're fighting with these people over the same sort of scraps of information. It's tough. And I admire people who do it. But it wasn't for me.
I mean, the thing is, you know, in political reporting, any kind of reporting, the stories you want to write are the stories nobody else is writing. But when you're at the White House, you have a responsibility to write, which is why the stories, the stories that everybody's writing. But so tell me about that adjustment from print to.
Yeah. So basically how it happened was I did one of these TV hits. It was it was my birthday and I forget which year, but I think it was, it must have been a presidential year. It must have been 20, it was 2012. And so the anchor had seen that it was my birthday, I am assuming in Politico playbook or something like that, and wished me happy birthday on the air. And so I sort of lit up and said, thank you. You know, like have a good, have a nice day. And so the bureau chief at the time at NBC, it was, this was an MSNBC live shot, sent an assistant up to to get me from the little flash camera box and said, you know, bring him, bring me down to his office. And so I sat down in his office and I'm like, kind of, why am I here? He says, like, you know, I saw your your live shot. Have you ever thought about being a TV correspondent.
And I said, Well, I didn't realize that that was like an option, you know? And he said, well, like, that was, you know, I saw your live shot and, you know, this is what you should you should try this. You could do this. And I thought, wow, okay. And there, obviously from there were some, you know, various bumps in the road. But this bureau chief, Antoine Cifuentes, was his name. He ended up working at CNN eventually. But he, you know, introduced me to Brian Williams, was anchoring the nightly news at the convention that year. And, you know, they sort of courted me. And Antoine ended up in a in a powerful position. And he hired me to to work at the network. And, you know, I didn't realize what I was getting into, because the job that I initially had there was not a full time on air job. I had to fight for that once I got in the door, and it was not easy. And, you know, it it it would have been very easy for that to have ended in a way that was not successful for me. And I feel like very lucky now, knowing what I, understanding what I didn't know about television when I walked in those doors, I'm a little bit floored that I didn't wind out up, wind up out.
What were you doing in that period when you weren't on the air?
So I was a reporter. I, my title was off air reporter and producer, and I worked in the Senate. It was based in the Senate. And I worked quite closely with Kelly O'Donnell, who was the Capitol Hill correspondent at the time, who is a an incredible human being. And, you know, I was just trying to do what I could to contribute what I could to the network. And, you know, I had mistakes. Right? I did a live shot on the weekend Today's show and everything about it was wrong. Right. The tracking on the piece was not very good. The writing was okay. I was a writer by trade. The writing was fine, but I wore a dress that had leather accents and sparkly eye shadow on a Saturday morning, and the producers watched it and they were like, No.
Yeah, I ran into the same problem, actually.
You know. And so I just, I wasn't ready for what, you know, what they needed because, you know, and now I have a better understanding of how that how that happened. And certainly there are things I would have done differently. But that said, you know, I did try to learn from those and rely on what I did know, which was I knew how to report. I knew how to write. I knew how to move information quickly. I knew what was important and what wasn't. And I just needed to figure out how to do the mechanics of making sure that information was transmitted in a different way. And so it took a while. You know, I became the NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent four years later in, because I went to NBC in the winter of 2013, after the 2012 campaign and after I finished covering the 2016 campaign is when I went back up to the Hill as an NBC News correspondent. So it took me four years.
Let me ask you about covering a presidential campaign.
It's the best thing ever.
Yeah. Well, I agree. But what. If you were telling a reporter, a young reporter, an embed, this is what you need to know to cover this well, what are the most important things to know? I have my own thoughts, but I'm interested.
I want to hear your thoughts.
Well, I'll trade. You go first.
Okay. I think that my main piece of advice would be to always be trying to look beyond what the campaign wants you to see. Because every day they are putting on a show for you and everything, literally everything down to the way that they have wrapped the plane and the name cards on the seats. Right. It's all. Everything matters. All of it matters. And so that would be my my main thing. And I think it's it's very easy, especially when you are, it's it's very hard when you are someone on the plane. You are part of a community of people. You're part of a community of reporters, of campaign aides. You know, you are all in it together to a certain extent, in a way that the rest of the world just isn't, because you're staying at the same hotels, you're eating the same crappy food, you're dealing with the same crises. You're like awake for the same amount of crazy hours. Right? And you're doing it all together. So you have to figure out the right balance between being a part of that and making sure that you are stepping back, looking at it like someone who's on the outside and applying a critical eye. And then the other thing I would also say, you know, the short version is that you should never forget that it's human beings. The candidate is a human being, the people that work for the candidates are human beings. And when something bad happens like they lose an election, like, you should treat it like they're human beings.
Yeah. You were with Mitt Romney at a. Were you there right to the end?
I was. I was there till the very end. I dropped him off in the motorcade, I was the AP reporter, at his house in Massachusetts after his concession event at a party where I think all of us reporters in the room thought, knew he was going to lose the election. They did not think that they were going to lose.
And I remember just being because, you know, obviously once you're no longer the nominee.
They had a big firework display.
Ready to go on the Boston Harbor.
They did. And and he had to rewrite his speech in real time. And after he gave the rewritten concession speech that he hadn't written ahead of time, he got in the motorcade with the Secret Service. We drove to his house. We dropped him off. And instead of the cars that would normally have waited there overnight, we all drove away. And he was left with no, with nothing. It was really, really remarkable.
Yeah. No, it's. It's stark. These things. You're going a thousand miles an hour in the most important, what feels like the most important endeavor you can be engaged in, and all of a sudden it stops when when you know, when you lose or when you're done, or when you're done. No, your advice. You said exactly what I would say, which is you got to cover the candidate, but don't let the candidate manipulate you and don't get so, you know, I used to when I was a young reporter covering national races, it bothered me when reporters were sort of checking each other's interpretation of the story. And I realized that everybody was sort of writing the same story. And so I always used to look for other stories to write, and I used to try and spend more time with voters. When you're on the plane, it's tough because you're shuttled on and off and, you know, you get. It's like a drive by with voters. Voters are important.
Right. Well, and the other thing about being on the plane is that oftentimes the only voters you're exposed to are the voters that the campaign wants you to talk to, because the ones that are at a lot of their events are ones that are, their organizing team has identified and brought. Right. They're like already supporters of the candidate. So it can be really tough.
'To find people. One of the things I started doing as a TV correspondent because, you know, or whenever I had an opportunity where I wasn't on the plane, because I. When you're a TV correspondent, you're on and off the plane a little bit more. When I was a wire reporter, I was on the plane the entire time, like for the duration, right? I got on the plane. They drove me everywhere. I got off the plane where they said, etc.. Once I started doing television, it's like I'd be on the plane for stretches and then we drop off. We'd do our nightly live shot. I used to do what I call the Walmart parking lot test, right, where you like drive to the local Walmart and just start asking people if they'll talk to you, because at least then you're getting a random sample of voters. It works better in a state like New Hampshire where everybody's super engaged than it does in, you know, states where the whole campaign is on TV. But it's a really it's a more interesting way to kind of get a cross-section, because when you're interviewing people at events, a lot of them have been organized to be there.
'We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of The Axe Files. And now back to the show. I want to go back to Congress for a second. You became very well-established on the Hill and you ultimately left MSNBC and NBC for CNN. We'll talk about that. But one of the last things that you covered was January 6th.
Talk to me about that, because, you know, in a sense that was like home to you.
So that must have been an incredibly painful and frightening experience.
It was. And yeah, I mean, the Hill and. I love Capitol Hill. I really do. It's it's a I. We talked about how part of what what I wanted to do here was to be part of it, of our collective national life. And the Hill is just such a central part of it.
Can I just interrupt you for one second on that?
Because people will hear that and they'll say, my God, how could you, you know, seems like such a squalid place. But there are a lot of people up there earnestly trying to do something and a lot of really interesting personalities and so on. So I think it needs to be said.
Thank you for saying that, yeah, because look, I mean, and this is part of what honestly, what January 6th has meant for me is it sort of shook this about me, which is that, you know, I came here as a pretty idealistic, patriotic person, right. Who very much believes in America and American democracy and being able to play a small role in it as you know, in this case, a member of the press, which I'm allowed to do because of our system of government. Right. And I have always believed, and I do still believe this, that there are a lot of really good people who come to Washington because they want to do good things and they care about the country. They care about their neighbors. Does that mean that there are not, the town does not have its share of like hangers on and lunatics and.
Charlatans. Exactly. Yes, absolutely. All, power draws all sorts of terrible people to it. That is true. But that doesn't mean that there aren't good ones here, too. And I, you know, those were the people that I was trying to seek out. And they exist of all stripes, right? They believe all sorts of different things. They don't all agree with each other, but hopefully they are united by this, you know, thread of common decency. And that has been a thing that has really been very challenging in recent years because the the level of of the expectation of decency has changed quite a bit. I think January 6th really shook me because, I mean, it obviously has all sorts of implications and I have to cover these every day as a political reporter on our democracy and all of that. But really, I mean, this was an attack on the place where I worked, and there were a lot of people that I cared about a lot who were there that day and who were in danger that day. And the police officers were there. I mean, I, I spent a lot of my career and, I mean, as, you know, like trying to figure out how to be fair as you do this job is one of the most important things. January 6th, I am very transparent on the air when I talk about it, that, you know, I had a personal experience there and I am going to be reflecting the personal experience that I had when I talk about it and when I am covering it. Those cops, the police officers that got beaten up, I mean, they were there protecting me and all, you know, and our democracy. Right. And it shook my faith in in the whole enterprise. And it made me wonder things that I hadn't really wondered before about kind of where the lines were, what was acceptable, what was possible. And I think the thing that I think back on the most is that is the hours where no one came, right? It's like you think that something like that happens. There's an emergency, right? Somebody calls 911, like the ambulance arrives, right? It's America, right? The ambulance shows up. Maybe there's maybe there's a bump in the road or two, but it comes. And no one came for hours. For hours. I mean, I remember calling at one point, too, that, like the planning for it. Like we were more surprised than we should have been by it. I mean, when I say we, at the time it was I was at NBC, so I can only provide that window. I When I went up there that day, I sent a text message. When I was driving in in the car, I was looking around on my way in. I didn't drive my own car because I didn't want to park it. We knew there were going to be protests and the car would've been parked like right in the middle of what ended up being this riot. So I can drive my car. I like took an Uber or whatever, and I texted my husband. I said, you know, this feels, like something about this feels very tense, right? Like like off. Like, I don't feel, I don't have a good feeling about this. And he wrote back and he said, Well, you'll be fine once you get inside the building. And that was really the thing, right? Like, there is this perception in Washington, like you're always kind of prepared, like we could be a target for a terrorist attack. People flew planes into the Twin Towers that we talked about, right? But if there was going to be an attack, if something bad was going to happen because I went to work at the Capitol building with, you know, the people that run our government, it was going to be because some foreign terrorist organization or some adversary did something horrible. It wasn't going to be because there were a mob of my own countrymen who came down the mall and smashed the windows and, you know, bear sprayed the cops to try to stop the election from being certified. Right. So, you know, it's it's it's a complex I have very complicated feelings about it, you know, and and it's still something I think about a lot.
I mean, they came down Pennsylvania Avenue in part because they were told that something untoward was happening in the Capitol. They were told that by the president.
Right. And he was the one that could have called them off.
You must have been taken aback, as I was, in the debate when he said I didn't have anything to do with that. They just asked me to make a speech.
Yeah. I mean, it's all on tape, right? I mean, the speech is on tape, and he says he wants to go down to the Capitol with them. I mean, it's, this is the thing. And this is the other piece of of why being a political reporter is is so different now than it was when I started, that there are just so many people who believe things that are refuted with things that they can see with their own eyes, you know?
Well, it does it implicates journalism because if you are trying to report what happened, if you are trying to report facts and there are all these forces that are presenting what famously came to be called alternative facts, then it makes the job harder.
It makes it feel impossible sometimes. And, you know, I think this is the thing that we all wrestle with that there's not necessarily a good answer to, which is that when you're trying to reflect and tell people what's going on, when you're trying to tell people something that's not true, you have to tell them what the thing was that was said that wasn't true in the first place. Right. And so you end up in this world where people are consuming things in such fragmented little pieces and where, you know, the leaders of the country have kind of embarked on this campaign to tell a lot of people, hey, you can't trust, you know, these organizations. You know, I think I'd like to think that if Americans understood the way that we are taught, you know, and again, I came up with the AP originally, which is a very like throw that ball right over the middle of the plate kind of place, you know, don't write with personality. That was my biggest challenge, by the way, when I came from the wire to television was to figure out like, okay, I can have a, they want you have a personality when you're on TV. Right. And I felt like I had been taught to take my personality out.
I saw you said somewhere, and it's true of politics as well as journalism, but authenticity is sort of the coin of the realm. If you're not if you're if you're not real, people sense there.
Yeah. And I think we're moving into an era, too, where it's going to become more important AI. As much as, you know, the sort of old school version of journalism was to remove personality. And I think I mean, admirably try to tell people what they needed to know so they could make up their own minds about what to do. Now, people are going to need, like, proof of life. They're going to need, like, proof of human from where they're getting their news and their information. It's interesting in order to really believe it. Certainly I have started to think about, like, I am more skeptical of things I see printed on a screen than I probably ever have been because of the speed with which.
And it's only going to get more challenging.
And it's going to get worse.
So let me just on this subject ask you, I've got a lot of friends at NBC and MSNBC and I spent a couple of years there. That's where we first met. But there is this sense that you got Fox and you got MSNBC and they represent different stripes. I always thought it's interesting. I mean, you're a great reporter, and I've always felt like you're a great reporter. But what are the pressures of sort of bouncing back between NBC News and MSNBC and sort of sorting out the roles?
It's tough. I mean, you know, I, I always and I will give credit to, you know, the partisan colleagues that I had at MSNBC for the most part, were very generous and careful with me in terms of trying not to put me in positions where it would compromise my integrity as a reporter and my ability to build, you know, trust, trusted relationships with people who believe different things and worked for different different sides of the aisle. So, you know, that that sort of personal, like Rachel Maddow, for example, is kind of the avatar of of, you know, maybe MSNBC's liberal leanings. And she was always, in particular, very gracious and careful about this to say, you know, tell the viewers like Kasie's a reporter. She's going to tell us what's going on. And then I'm going to talk to this other guest over here or I'm going to tell you myself kind of what I should.
She's a very kind and gracious person.
She is. And so, you know, that example, I think, helped me, because MSNBC is part of. The newsgathering apparatus at NBC News. And again, it can be difficult for for viewers and people on the outside to really understand this. But the NBC News gathering apparatus is different and distinct from the MSNBC hosts that do the shows. Right. And so I always just tried to stick to kind of what my thing is, which is to try to figure out what was going on and bring sort of that new information to the table and and try to figure out how to ultimately be myself while doing it.
You left to come here to CNN and you left for a specific role. Which was to play a major role as an anchor and host on CNN Plus, which didn't last very long.
And when you got that news, how did you receive that?
Well, so, David, it's funny. So I was hired to go to CNN Plus in the in the summer of 2021. And I started in September at CNN. And we would be taken over the following April by Warner Brothers Discovery, by Discovery and become Warner Brothers Discovery. And three weeks after that happened, they canceled CNN Plus. And the CNN Plus show had launched on March 29th. So just a week or so before the deal was closed. But just a few months earlier, in October of 2021, I had discovered I had learned that I in the late summer, early fall, that I had a brain tumor.
Right. I want I want to very much ask you about that.
Well, it's relevant to this because I had that surgery in October of that year. And so when CNN Plus collapsed, it was obviously a very difficult professional situation for me, but it was far from the worst thing that had happened to me in the previous 12 months.
You know, the thing that struck me as I was reading about your life is that you lived a pretty charmed life.
You know, and then all of a sudden, the roof fell in. In many ways. You were married. You had a child. One child. You now have two. Tell me about that. First, the experience, which is far more important, of being told you had a tumor. And at first you probably. You didn't know what it was.
Right. Yeah. So I started getting these headaches. I was anchoring an early morning show, Way Too Early, right before Morning Joe on MSNBC. And one day I was in my basement because it was Covid. So my studio was in my basement. The letters on the teleprompter started to swim. Like if you've ever had a migraine. Right. And that's what I thought it was, because the other members of my family have migraines. And this was the winter, January, February, March, March, I think. And I went to see a neurologist about what I thought were migraines. And she said, Yeah, that's probably what this is, but let's send you for a routine MRI. So I go for a routine MRI. This is, you know, by now it's springtime. And they find something on the MRI, but they have no idea what it is, small, whatever it is. And so clearly someone thought it might be cancer because they eventually send me to an oncologist. And no one ever says, I don't know if you've had this experience in your life or a loved one, you know, you've been with a loved one where the doctors know a lot more than they will tell you.
Yeah, well, I have, you know, I have a child with chronic epilepsy that started when she was seven months old and no one ever said the word epilepsy.
It's so strange, but that's how it happens. So no one ever said that to me. No one ever said cancer or it might be cancer or anything like that. And so, you know, I'm going through this process and initially I'm very, you know, concerned about it. But basically there's no way to test. I had to look throughout the whole rest of my body, because they looked at it and they were like, well, you're young woman. You probably, this is not it's not in a place in the brain where it's likely to be glioblastoma. What are the other cancers that you might have? You might have skin cancer and a breast cancer. So now we're going to check everywhere. It would have been great if my insurance company would have approved a Pet scan, which would have told me one test, but instead I had to do multiple tests of, you know, skin check and mammogram and a CT scan of everything. They found no cancer anywhere, right? So at this point, we're like, okay, it's there's no cancer. We don't think it's, it's not cancer that came from somewhere else and landed in your brain. And so they at that point, we don't know what it is. It's so little. It's not changing. We're doing periodic scans. It could have been a vascular thing. It could have been. There are many things this little dot could have been, right. So we're like, okay, we're just going to you're going to you're going to go about your life. It's not growing. It's not changing. We're going to monitor it. You're going to get MRI's every three months. I say, okay. And this, at this point I'm like, okay, well, I guess I could go to CNN. I guess I could make this big job switch, because at this point it's summer and we're in the heat of these negotiations. And I initially thought, well, I better just when I thought it might be brain cancer, I was like, I guess I better just stay put.
But I didn't actually find out that it was a tumor until after the deal. You know, at this point, I think, okay, I'm fine. I had I had found some medication that that fixed the symptoms. I wasn't having the headaches anymore. I was figuring out how to live with whatever this was. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to go do this. I'm going to take this new job. And then I went to get, you know how like when you do change jobs, like you do all your things, because you get your, got your week off and you take all, you do all your doctor's appointments, to get an MRI just to check on it. And then I start at CNN and then I get a call, well this thing is actually growing, that means it's definitely a tumor. That means we need to figure out what it is. So it was this very long process of.
And when you got that word, you know, like I said, you had a young kid, all kinds of things. There's a surreality to the whole thing. Like nobody thinks this is going to happen to them.
Yeah, no, no. And it was very. I mean, I look back on it and I'm like, did that really happen to me? Like, did that stuff really happen to me? Yeah, it was. I mean, I think there was a small part of me. It's funny, I, one of the people that I called after I called the leadership CNN, one of whom I think thought I was calling to tell her I was pregnant. Kind of, you know, I joke, yeah, I'd really rather have an unplanned pregnancy than an unplanned brain tumor, but. It is what it is. But Jeff Zucker put me in touch with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who is, of course, a neurosurgeon. And I think one of the things I felt and he vocalized this without my having have to because he is also, of course, a journalist. He was like, you probably want to know what's going on in your head. Because the question then was, should I have surgery to go in and remove this? Because again, it was a small, slow growing thing. And it's a little bit complicated, but I ended up at the University of Pennsylvania, because no one had been able to figure out what this thing was from the scans. Right. Like everybody was mystified. Johns Hopkins thought it was definitely cancer, that it was definitely glioblastoma. They didn't want to operate because if they did, like they said, it was so small. The biggest challenge is going to be finding it. And they didn't want to go in and not get it.
Yes. I was like, okay, you think I have, you know, a cancerous brain tumor and you don't think I should take it out? And then I went to Penn. And I'm an incredibly lucky. The CEO of of Penn Medicine is the neighbor that we grew up across the street from. And I grew up in a 1955, you know, three bed, two bath, split level American suburban house. Right. With a whole bunch of other families like that. We all went to like local public elementary school down the street. And Kevin Mahoney, who runs Penn now, it was across the street, grew up with his kids. And so he called their head of neurosurgery. And Dr. Daniel Schorr, who looked at my scans and took it to the board that they have there. And he calls me and he's like, I think I know what this is. And it was in much more, with much more confidence than they had given me at Hopkins. He was like, I think it's this very specific type of tumor. It's a hemangioblastoma. And I think if I take it out, you'll get better. And the hardest thing about it, because it's so small, will be finding it and removing it. But that's my problem, not yours. And I was like, okay, we're going to we're going to do that, you know? And I think trying to figure out what that. Like, that's the thing. I didn't know what it was, I wanted it out of my head. And. And so it really wasn't too much of a question. But then I never after he told me that after he said, this is not cancerous, this is benign, this is this thing, I never I believed him from the from the get go. My parents didn't. I think my parents were very nervous about the pathology report coming back after the surgery was finished and whether or not we were going to find out it was something like much worse. But for some reason, I never doubted him.
So Kasie, and I lied to everybody and said we were going to talk about the election, but we're not. Because. Because you're way more interesting to me. How did this change you?
It changed me very fundamentally. Actually, I feel incredibly blessed. I don't I don't really talk very much about this, but I am actually a person of faith. And I know that this is something that happened to me when I was 36 years old because it gave me a chance to make sure that every single day I am doing the things that are the most important to me and putting the right things in the right order. And I think it's really easy. And I think I was definitely guilty of doing it sometimes, more often, a lot. Maybe even mostly. Of thinking about and prioritizing things that don't matter, whether it's, you know, how you look to other people or whether you were, you know, given the the top slot on Nightly News or bumped for someone who is the hotter currency of the moment with with your network. I spent a lot of time caring about that kind of thing.
It's kind of natural in this business.
Yeah. Yeah. But it motivates people to do shitty stuff and. I always knew that I never wanted to let myself do that. But I think that I also was swept up in it. And I just I have a I have trouble articulating it because I still think, and this experience underscored for me, I think work is very important. And having work that is fulfilling to a person, you know, good, honest work is like an incredibly important value and part of like being a full human. I think that this environment, this town, this business can really warp what that means. And now I don't. You know, I. I don't always get to, but now my my son just started at like a real school, right, that gets out at 315. Right. And I anchor an early morning show and I am trying my damnedest to be there most days to pick him up because, like, when I was staring all of this in the face, like, I just spent the week before my brain surgery contemplating what my son's world was going to look like without me in it. And I could have cared less if I was ever on television ever again. Right. Ever again. Didn't matter at all. But the idea that I wasn't going to, like, get to see him graduate from high school or be there if he came home because some kid bullied him on the playground and he was upset. Right. Like I wasn't going to I wasn't going to that that was the thing that, like, really crystallized for me what matters. Now, I mean, I have I was also very blessed to have had an incredible like run professionally, like I have done so much. I have accomplished so much. If I had been 18 when this had happened, I might have thought, man, like all of these things I wanted to do, I'll never get a chance to. Right. I think that for the, you know, for different people, this can manifest in different ways in terms of showing, you know, you what what is really the the thing that is the most important to you. But you know, I am now not I am not someone who. And January 6th contributed this, too, because it it kind of shattered my my sense of the security of the system in which we all operate. So between that and and having this health event, I just my sort of sense of of what matters the most and my willingness to let other people tell me what should be the most important thing to me is very limited now.
I think it's it is a blessing to to think that you had a tumor that made you healthier.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm one of the lucky ones.
Because the, the thing that you just said is a lesson for everybody, which is that there are bigger things in life than the next rung, whether you're in or out of a meeting, whether you're at the top of the news or not at the top of the news, whatever it is that you do, the things that are enduring, the things that last are family and friends and children and and good for you that you have those things in the right order.
And your relationships in the business too. I mean, I have seen people really act poorly towards their colleagues as well, and I refuse to do that, as well. Even though there are definitely ways where sometimes being the worst person will get you ahead in this job, like I just I don't I don't want to be that person. And I like to think that I wasn't before, but certainly I was tempted, and now I am not tempted at all.
Yeah, well, you're certainly you're certainly not that person. We didn't talk about the election, but you should tune in every day from 5 to 7 on CNN, because Kasie.
AM. Yes. AM, for early risers. Because Kasie has tremendous grasp of of what's going on out there and looks at it through some really, really keen and experienced eyes. Kasie Hunt, pleasure to be with you.
This was such a pleasure, David. I'm I'm so touched that that you asked me all these questions. Thank you.
Well well, I think people will enjoy hearing from you, so thank you. A lot of wisdom in a young package.
I don't know. Just trying. One foot in front of the other.
Thank you for listening to The Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Berry, Jeff Fox and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Lickteig and Haley Thomas. For more programing from IOP, visit politics dot uChicago dot edu.
