Gwen Ifill: Dominating The Political Arena

Many black journalists are familiar with the fight for diversity in the media world and familiar faces of color are always celebrated. Gwen Ifill is no exception. An accomplished author and political journalist, Ifill is one of the most familiar names in political journalism. She is the host of Washington Week, which is on its 42^nd season.  She has covered several high profile stories including six presidential campaigns and has moderated two vice presidential debates. Although Ifill is a natural in the political arena, she didn’t originally set out to be a political journalist.

“I knew early on that I wanted to be a reporter, but I didn’t know I was a political journalist until my first job in Boston, in the ’70s, covering the public school committee at a time when busing was a huge issue,” said Ifill to O Magazine. “Children’s lives were being directly affected by political decisions, and that’s when I realized that everything is politics.”

Ifill’s family was also a major influence on her activities with her father being an activist and her family sitting down to watch political television. “My family was very engaged in the world around us. My father was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and an immigrant from Panama. He was deeply involved in civil rights activism, which scared my mother—she was also an immigrant, from Barbados, who had her hands full with six kids, and she worried that my father would get deported,” Ifill continued. “But because of his passion for politics and civil rights, we paid close attention to current events. We would watch political conventions together—for fun!”

Ifill is also an accomplished author with her book “Breakthrough,” a book about black politics during the Obama era, that was released in 2009. “My theory was that Obama was unique, but he wasn’t alone—that there was a treasure trove of black politicians who approach politics differently than their forebears. The hardest part was that things kept changing,” Ifill said of her motivation to write the book.  “I was literally in the middle of writing a chapter about Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, the only black governor in America, when I looked up at my TV to see that Eliot Spitzer had resigned and David Paterson had become the first African-American governor of New York state.”

Many journalists would worry about maintaining their objectivity as an author but not Ifill. Critics that claimed she would not be able to maintain her objectivity as a journalist and she rebuffs that claim. “They ignored that I’ve been a reporter for 30 years, that I did a debate in 2004 and no one complained,” Ifill said. “People seized on the book as a way to discredit me, but I don’t think it worked; people with any knowledge of my career rejected it out of hand.”

In all, despite her countless accolades, Ifill insists she’s just doing her job. “I just keep my head down and try to accomplish what my parents set out for me: that there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do. But I also look up periodically and think, “Who else can I pull along?” Because it’s a failure if I’m up here by myself,” she said.

–Ashleigh Atwell