It’s remarkable when you get the opportunity to speak with someone who has experienced such immense respect and admiration in their industry. And Soledad O’Brien, deserving of both, would be the first to dismiss those notions, with candor and warmth.
Earlier in her career, O’Brien anchored a show for MSNBC, before moving on to co-anchor NBC’s Weekend Today and contributed segments to the Today show and NBC Nightly News.
“I’ve been around this business a long time,” O’Brien jokes.
In 2003, O’Brien transitioned to CNN, where she was the face of CNN’s morning news shows.
Her work has been recognized with three Emmy awards. She was also honored twice with the George Foster Peabody award for her coverage of Hurricane Katrina and her reporting on the BP Gulf Coast Oil Spill.
As a student at Harvard, O’Brien learned an invaluable lesson during a controversial lecture.
“I was a freshman or sophomore in the audience, and I couldn’t contribute because I wasn’t prepared. There were students attending the lecture who understood the minutia and details in the discussion. You can’t debate someone unless you know about the issue. You look like an idiot. That taught me you really had to know yourself.”
O’Brien said she comes from a close and loving family. At college, she said she met so many people that weren’t like her.
“I was able to engage in debate. You might not always agree with someone, but that didn’t stop you from being good friends. There are mentors you have for years, who help shape you. I’ve also had mentors where I didn’t even realize they were mentors. I’m a big believer that mentors make you successful, so glom on to one when you can.”
In 2013, CNN came to O’Brien and said management wanted to take her show in a different direction.
“Which meant they wanted someone else to anchor the show,” O’Brien said.
That was fine with O’Brien as she was ready to switch gears. That included putting her energy into her new business, Starfish Media Group. Ironically, CNN became Starfish’s first client the day after she left the network.
“I wanted to create a new model where I could control my own content,” she explained. “I’m not sure I could have made a move like that until that point.”
When O’Brien started at CNN, her job focused on live, breaking coverage. Whatever was unfolding at that moment.
“I liked that a lot, but it had its limits,” she said. “I’ve always loved long-form work, like documentaries.”
The timing of her move to creating long-form content may have come at a fortuitous time as the news business has been morphing.
O’Brien said straight news could be a loss-leader for organizations.
“You’re dealing with organizations who are trying to make a profit, and that is more challenging today. Journalists and reporters today are judged by how often a story is re-tweeted. How often it is viewed. The quality of the piece no longer seems to be the issue. If you’re not re-tweeted, the story is perceived as not being good enough,” she said. “A reporter has to wonder and worry whether they are going to be able to keep their job by a public that is judging their news story.”
Her personal view of the social media landscape since she left network news is simple. O’Brien said she doesn’t care how many people follow her. She’s not concerned with who she is following, and doesn’t care if something she writes or creates goes viral. For O’Brien, it’s the quality and importance of the work that carry the day.
“If I lose X-thousand followers, I don’t track it,” O’Brien said. “To me, my feed is all about bringing people stories they might not get elsewhere. I like uncomfortable and awkward conversations. Race is an uncomfortable conversation. With Starfish, I did a series focusing on women who were rescuers at 9/11. We checked if they were written out of history, and they were. A lot of stories were done on rescue dogs, but not the women.”
She said her production company has allowed her to tell stories she believes in.
“When you tell people stories about people who have been undercovered, you widen the tent. I think people are interested in the complex narrative which is the American narrative.”
Starfish has given her and the stories she produces a broader reach.
“We’re interested in distribution of our original content,” O’Brien said. “We can allow our content to live on numerous platforms.”
Regardless of where the content ends up, O’Brien said good journalism never changes. The quality of work is what should rule the day. When she left CNN, O’Brien was given her entire vault of work from the network, more than 50 hours of work. She said that the library has been invaluable to Starfish.
“I don’t think I initially knew how important it was,” she said. “Having a library of material has been so important to us. It has allowed us to tell our stories in a more accessible way. Networks can tell journalists how to navigate around a story. We don’t have to do that as I think owning the material is essential to good storytelling.”
At one of her network jobs, O’Brien inquired if she could do a documentary on poverty in America. She met with a response equating to, ‘Ew, nobody wants to see that.’
“Now I can tell that story,” she said. “We’re witnessing the disappearance of the middle class and I can bring that story to people who are interested. You’re dealing with your own content and you can shop it until you find the right outlet. Until somebody says it’s great. I can develop stories I feel passionate about.”
Since she left network television, O’Brien thinks some of the content on cable and television has been less than satisfying.
“Everything today is over the top, crazy,” she explained. “During the 2016 debates, my son asked me what they meant by Donald Trump’s fingers being small. I said I had no idea. That became a constant discussion and that’s unfortunate. The media’s job should be to inform people. To undergird our work with data and analysis. Today, the crazier it is, the more air time it gets.”
In regards to the mid-term elections in November, O’Brien said all the political talking heads got it wrong.
“It was an inaccurate narrative,” she said. “There were completely bullshit stories. People were gobbling it up hook-line and sinker. I’m impressed with the young people and how they responded in the voting booth. It showed me they aren’t necessarily watching the evening news.”
Since 2016, O’Brien has been the host for Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, a nationally syndicated weekly talk show produced by Hearst Television.
With Starfish and SO’B Productions, O’Brien produced the documentary, The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks. It can be viewed on Peacock TV.
“Rosa Parks was a complete badass,” O’Brien said. “The New York Times eulogized Parks as an accidental matriarch. That wasn’t accurate. They treated her as though one day the woman was tired and didn’t want to give up her seat.”
No, Rosa Parks wasn’t a woman randomly snared in history. She was a secretary for the NAACP and was looking to make a statement.
“That cracked me up when she was termed an accidental matriarch,” O’Brien said. “Somebody had to do what Parks did. I’m always amazed by the stories we tell ourselves. Parks was close to the Black Panthers.”
It wasn’t like she was just coming home from shopping at the A&P and decided to take on the establishment. When Parks was 8 years-old, her grandfather would stay up nights on the porch with a shotgun to keep the KKK at bay.
O’Brien doesn’t understand why we were made to believe it was a random experience.
“Who benefits from it being accidental?” O’Brien asked. “It was treated as folklore. There’s no way Harriett Tubman just one day woke up and decided to start an underground railroad. Things like this are planned.”
Her SO’B Productions has produced documentary films such as Hungry to Learn, Who Killed My Son?, Kids Behind Bars, Babies Behind Bars, War Comes Home, Honor Delayed, and Heroin.
“I just like getting history right,” O’Brien said. “It’s easy to get marginalized people wrong. We write people out of a story that deserve to be in there.”
The documentary Heroin exposed the veteran journalist to amazing revelations.
“It’s so sad,” she explained. “In the show a woman has a child, and it’s clear she loved her child. When told by the interviewer she was essentially killing her daughter with her own drug addiction, the mother replied uh-huh.”
O’Brien said the mother was aware what she was doing was in essence killing her child, and she just reacted so matter of factly.
“It was chilling. She knew it, but didn’t choose or couldn’t do anything about it.”
O’Brien said there are so many chilling stories surrounding the opioid crisis. Parents are at their wits end.
“Nothing they were trying to do was working. There was no way they could help someone they loved. Things were so crazy around the house, families were putting valuables in a safe to keep the abuser from ripping them off. Treatment often doesn’t work. There was one person who had undergone nine stays in rehab. That costs a great deal of money.”
In the same documentary, O’Brien said she was interviewing one woman and she’d brought a friend with her to the interview.
“She looked put together, normal,” O’Brien said. “It turns out she too was a heroin addict. I asked her what she did for a living, and she told me she was a kindergarten teacher. She’d buy drugs on the street. It was shocking to me. If you saw her on the street, there’s no way you’d think she was a heroin user. I was completely stunned. Across America, heroin abuse is skyrocketing, and not just in poor communities. In Vermont alone, treatment for opiate addiction, including heroin and Oxycontin, has risen 770% since 2000.”
In all of her work, O’Brien said it’s her goal to always have people feel they can tell her something. Establish a trust. Truly listen to them.
“In Honor Delayed, we looked at a number of people who were eligible for the Medal of Honor, but for whatever reason didn’t get it. A number of these people were Black (or) Jewish. These are people that honorably served our country and were denied the medal for whatever reason. Despite their extraordinary acts of heroism, the nation’s highest honor has long remained elusive for a group of exceptional American veterans.”
Of the nearly 4,000 medals awarded, only 234 have been awarded to minority service members. O’Brien needed to know why.
O’Brien is a child of mixed heritage. Her Australian father is of Irish and Scottish descent and her mother is from Havana of Afro-Cuban descent. “Growing up in the only Afro–Cuban family in my town on Long Island may have given me some appreciation for outsiders, for people who look and speak differently.”
“My mother taught French and English,” O’Brien said. “I don’t really consider myself bi-lingual, but I’m very good at Spanglish,” she jokes. “I think it would be so much easier to interview people in their native tongue.”
She spends winters in Florida where she rides horses, enjoys life. In 2016, O’Brien appeared in Zoolander 2. “I always seem to play the reporter,” she jokes. “I had so much fun and the people were very nice.”
O’Brien said she also loves doing hair.
“As a girl of color, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.”
Jim Cryns writes features for Barrett News Media. He has spent time in radio as a reporter for WTMJ, and has served as an author and former writer for the Milwaukee Brewers. To touch base or pick up a copy of his new book: Talk To Me – Profiles on News Talkers and Media Leaders From Top 50 Markets, log on to Amazon or shoot Jim an email at jimcryns3_zhd@indeedemail.com.
