Inside the Newsroom When Truth Was on Trial

For more than three decades, Wendy Fisher helped shape what millions of people saw and understood as “the news.”

She spent 34 years at ABC News, rising from overnight shifts to senior roles inside one of the most influential news organizations in the world. From that vantage point, she watched presidents come and go, media habits transform, and newsroom culture crack open under the pressure of Me Too and a national reckoning on race.

She sat down for an interview on Tutors, Mentors, and The City, a conversation series run by Kevin “Dotcom” Brown through The City Tutors, to reflect on her path, the changing media landscape, and why curiosity and basic kindness still matter more than cleverness.

“I walked in at 25 thinking I was really smart,” Fisher says. “I knew nothing about anything.”

Growing Up in One Vertical

Fisher was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on 106th and Broadway. She attended private school in New York City and then headed to Amherst College in Massachusetts. Amherst, she says, taught her to think, read, write, and challenge ideas. She did not have a wild college experience, but she got what she most needed: the ability to pay close attention and use language carefully.

After graduating, she did not have a clear career plan. She loved French, so she went to France. That choice led to a master’s in French studies at NYU, then another master’s degree in France. She stayed in school because she was good at it. Eventually, though, she had to answer a simple question: what kind of work would actually fit her?

“I knew I was really curious,” she says. “I liked reading the newspaper. I wanted to understand the world.”

That curiosity, more than any credential, pulled her into journalism. She landed at ABC News in 1989. At first she took whatever was handed to her. She worked overnight for two and a half years. She learned the culture, the politics, the demands, the names. She watched how stories moved from a tip or a press release to a finished segment.

Over time, she moved up inside one part of the organization. She did not bounce across departments. She grew inside what she calls a “vertical,” doing different levels of jobs in the same general area until she became one of the people others turned to for guidance.

“I felt it was very valuable that I had grown up in a certain part of the organization and knew it so well,” she says. “I had done the jobs at different levels, so I could help other people in that space.”

Covering Trump, Obama, and the Question of Truth

Fisher worked at ABC News through multiple presidencies. The transition from Obama to Trump stands out as a turning point.

“It is no surprise that the Trump era threw the media into a tailspin,” she says.

For decades, coverage of the White House followed certain norms. You could go to a briefing, listen to an official, and assume that, while politics shaped the message, the basic facts were not wildly detached from reality. You still verified information, but the starting point was different.

Trump did not follow those norms.

Almost immediately, Fisher remembers, the old methods of covering the presidency stopped working. She points to the dispute over crowd size at his inauguration as an early sign.

“You could show a picture of the crowd and be told, ‘No, that is not what it was,’” she says. “That summed up how the next four years would go.”

Newsrooms built new systems just to vet statements in real time. Each claim required layers of checks. More people had to be involved in every story. The work intensified.

At the same time, the president began calling the media “the enemy of the people.” That was not just rhetoric. It changed what it felt like to stand in a press pen at a rally or to walk into a room with cameras. Security became a real concern.

“It was an uncomfortable time,” Fisher says. “Very hard work. But it was also a time when more people were watching and reading. Attention on the media went up.”

Covering Barack Obama felt completely different, she says. His election was a powerful moment in American history for many in the media, although not for all Americans, because the country is deeply divided.

“In terms of how difficult it was to cover him, it was not difficult in that same way,” she says. “He was a traditional president with a traditional White House and a play by the book mindset.”

Inside the Newsroom Before and After Me Too

When Fisher started, television news looked a lot like the culture portrayed in shows like The Morning Show.

“News divisions were exactly what people think of them,” she says. “Male dominated, a lot of yelling, a lot of long hours, private time with senior men.”

Anchors and top talent often saw themselves as the center of the universe. Complaints were rarely followed up on. Bullies flourished. Most of the people in power were white men.

Fisher did not personally experience sexual harassment, but she saw and felt the larger environment. She often sat in rooms as the only woman. She accepted that reality as “just the way it is” and learned how to navigate it.

Me Too, and later the national response to the murder of George Floyd, forced news organizations to face that culture more directly. HR departments grew, policies shifted, and hiring changed. Newsrooms became more diverse, although not evenly and not without resistance.

“Nothing is perfect,” Fisher says. “But many organizations are not the same places they were when I started. The issues the country is dealing with have been dealt with inside newsrooms too. Sometimes well, sometimes not well.”

COVID, Bombings, and Stories That Do Not Leave

Asked which news event affected her most, Fisher pauses. There are many. Hurricanes. War. Mass shootings. Each one asks something from the people covering it.

COVID sits at the top of the list.

“It was unprecedented,” she says. “There was nothing quite like it in anyone’s memory.”

Most big stories feel, at least a little, like something you covered before. There is some template, some muscle memory, that helps you decide how to deploy crews, how to frame the stakes, how to talk to audiences.

With COVID, there was nothing. People were scared. Journalists were working from home or from improvised setups. The virus did not respect any of the usual borders between “work” and “life.”

“You are trying to cover what is happening to the country while it is also happening to you,” she says. “That is very hard.”

The Boston Marathon bombing also left a deep mark on her.

“There are stories that are very shocking and very frightening,” she says. “They never leave you.”

Mass shootings, in particular, are some of the most emotionally devastating stories to cover, because the loss is so intimate and so preventable, and because the pattern repeats.

Building a Career on Curiosity

For all the complexity of modern media, Fisher returns again and again to one trait that she believes defines good journalists: genuine curiosity.

“If you want to be a journalist, you really have to be curious,” she says. “Otherwise you cannot do it.”

Curiosity shows up in how you listen, how you ask questions, how willing you are to sit in someone else’s experience without rushing to your own point of view. It also shapes how you move through a newsroom.

She encourages aspiring journalists, including the young woman who recently approached her at a live event and is now her mentee, to be flexible about how they enter the field. There is no single ladder.

“You may have to leave New York,” she says. “You may have to start in a job that does not look glamorous. No job is too small.”

Some people go to journalism school and still find themselves at the bottom. Others start in small markets, online outlets, or support roles and move up from there. The path rarely looks clean.

What matters, she says, is the combination of curiosity and willingness.

“Do the Job You Have Now Really Well”

When students and early career professionals ask Fisher how to get ahead, her answer is simple.

“There are no tricks,” she says. “You have to work hard. You have to be willing. Never underestimate enthusiasm.”

Bosses notice the person who says, “Sure, I will do it,” and then follows through. They notice colleagues who are reliable and pleasant to work with. They also notice the opposite.

“You can be a genius and still make it very hard on yourself if you are a pain to work with,” she says.

If someone asks you to get coffee, get the coffee and get the order right. Take pride in doing what is in front of you well.

“People ask, ‘How do I get promoted?’” she says. “The answer is usually, ‘Do the job you are doing now really, really well.’ Then you are much more likely to get the next one.”

Staying Human in a Changing Industry

Fisher spent her career inside an industry that has had to reinvent itself over and over again. When she started at ABC News, executives wanted printed newspapers on their desks every morning. By the time she left, audiences were checking headlines on phones and watching live streams on platforms that did not exist when she first walked in the door.

Through all of that, some things did not change for her. Learning another language, in her case French, opened new doors and gave her a richer sense of the world. Listening with care mattered more than sounding clever. Integrity, even when it was hard, remained non negotiable.

Asked what she most wants young people to remember as they start their careers, in journalism or anywhere else, she circles back to basics:

Be curious. Be willing. Be kind. Do your job well.

“It is not about tricks,” she says. “It is about how you show up every day.”