For more than a year, PBS NewsHour senior correspondent Judy Woodruff has crisscrossed America interviewing people about the divisions fracturing the country. In early April, she’ll be back in North Carolina to discuss her reporting in the season finale of the Guilford College Bryan Series.
Judy was anchor of the NewsHour before stepping away from that role at the end of 2022 to spend two years leading up to the next Presidential election on a series for the news program entitled “America at a Crossroads.” She’ll talk about what she has learned when she speaks at Tanger Center at 7:30 pm Tuesday, April 9.
North Carolina is familiar territory for the long-time, trailblazing broadcast journalist, who was born in Tulsa, Okla., but has lived all over. A self-described “Army brat,” she finished sixth grade in the public schools of Roanoke Rapids, where she had step-grandparents. She’s returned there to visit family over the years.
She attended Meredith College in Raleigh, where her interest in politics was kindled, and graduated in 1968 from Duke University. Later, she served as a member of the university’s Board of Trustees. Her husband, journalist Al Hunt, graduated from Wake Forest University in 1965.
Judy was in Greensboro the week of March 18 to check on the “Ready for School, Ready for Life” program supported by The Duke Endowment, for which she is a trustee. On March 25 she gave the long-running Weil Lecture on American Citizenship for the Institute for the Arts & Humanities at UNC Chapel Hill.
She’s one in a long line of broadcast legends to speak in the Bryan Series, including Tom Brokaw, Christiane Amanpour, Ted Koppel, the late Cokie Roberts, Lesley Stahl, Bill Moyers and Judy’s NewsHour co-anchor, the late Gwen Ifill, who moderated a conversation between former Sen. Bill Bradley and former Gov. Jeb Bush in March 2013.
Judy’s reporting career began in local television news in Atlanta. She was named White House correspondent for NBC News in 1976 and has covered every Presidential election since then. In addition to PBS, she has reported for and hosted programs for CNN.
She has moderated a number of debates including the 1988 Vice Presidential debate between Sen. Dan Quayle and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen in which Lloyd stated, “I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.”
Tickets for the April 9 program are available at the Tanger Center Box Office and at ticketmaster.com.