TV's Ann Curry remains a storyteller at heart

In Sarasota Friday to speak at a Tidewell Hospice fundraising luncheon, Ann Curry was running behind in interviews with local media. That's because when you ask her a question, she tells you a story.

The longtime national and world broadcast correspondent, who anchored NBC's "Today" and nightly news shows before leaving the network in 2015, has also been a caregiver for her late parents. Asked about the connection she sees between working in a war zone and caring for a loved one with cancer, she embarks on a memory of rushing from her father's bedside to an overseas assignment.

"It was a war zone and I had just gotten through interviewing some people who had suffered a great deal," she said, when she telephoned her father in the hospital. It was a conversation that crystallized for her that "it's really the good you've done in your life" that matters most.

"As a journalist, you can see a great deal, unfortunately, of human suffering and you wish that the world would move away from it," she said. "And as a caregiver, as somebody who has tried to help your parents suffer less from cancer, you also want to end their suffering. But there’s a limit to what you can do. So what you have to do is love them more."

Hospice, she said, offers a way to love someone more at the end of life.

The winner of seven Emmy Awards, Curry built her career by covering humanitarian crises and being unafraid to display compassion on the air. Remembered for her heartbroken speech in 2013 when she announced that she was stepping down as a Today co-anchor, she believes that journalists who show their feelings are no less professional than those who try to appear detached.

"We cannot lose our humanity," she said. "While we should approach every story with an effort towards objectivity by using the practice of finding the truth, when there is true human suffering, we should not disrespect it by belittling it or making it less true." 

Compassion is a natural result of respecting sources, whether they're presidents or refugees, Curry added -- and respect helps a journalist tell a better story.

"If I treat them with respect I’m more likely to get the truth," she said. "I’m more likely to find that part that might connect them to the people who are consuming my journalism."

At 60, Curry rose to the top of television news with few female role models to emulate. She admits there was a time when that she didn't feel so free to approach her work with such a personal style. 

"I was one of those people who wore a bow tie and a crisp white shirt and a suit and I cut my hair," she said. "I wanted to be accepted -- just as all the young men -- as a good reporter. My first place of work as a journalist was all men except me. And I was told I could not be a journalist because women have no news judgment."

No longer tethered to a regular on-camera role, Curry has been watching the swirl of rhetoric around the presidential election and new administration, and worrying about the reputation of a profession she loves.

"I think we have reached a very sad moment in journalism," she said, "when it is clear that the work is vulnerable to economic pressures, corporate interests, biased reporting. I think that where we are today is an opportunity ... to become better."

This requires a renewed emphasis, she believes, on the traditional skill-based practice of journalism -- choosing sources wisely, checking facts, always attributing information. And it requires an understanding that a nation's political progress relies on solid grass-roots reporting.

"Good local papers are a source for news throughout the country -- not just in their communities," she said. "So people in major cities look to these newspapers to find out what’s going on in those communities. As you cover presidential elections, as you cover national issues, national trends -- when that voice is less heard because it’s been silenced, because of economic changes, then it’s easier for the country to be confused about who it is."