a few minutes after the show ended and asked him how the interview with Trump went. “It went well — he’s always recep-
tive,” Blitzer said simply, stating the obvious about the outspoken real estate mogul and reality-TV star. If he seemed unemotional, it was likely because it was one of hundreds of such interviews he’s conducted over the years. In this busy election season alone, Blitzer had already interviewed all of the Republican contenders (including, just the day before, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich) and single- handedly moderated two of the more than a dozen Republican debates staged so far. Blitzer’s detachment from the sto-
ries he reports and his objective inter- views are the keys to his longevity as a top-tier newsman in a very competitive industry that is constantly evolving. At CNN, Blitzer is a reliable, stabi-
lizing force, a personality who has not only hung in there but thrived even as his network, once the top-rated news channel on cable (and for a long time the only one), has struggled in recent years — particularly in prime time — in the face of competition, most notably from top-rated Fox News Channel. The more the news business changes, the more Wolf Blitzer remains the same. “He’s really got that old-school journalism quality to him,” said Rob- ert Thompson, professor of TV and popular culture at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “Doing old- school, orthodox broadcast journal- ism strangely enough makes him something of an iconoclast” today, Thompson said. A former Blitzer colleague from
CNN, Frank Sesno, put it another way. “Wolf is a news machine. Because of his name and his style and his com- mitment to what he does, he is distinc- tive, and there are very few distinctive
‘news machines’ left — recognizable personalities who are only about hard news. And that sets him apart.” Sesno is now director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washing- ton University.
W
olf Isaac Blitzer, the son of Jew- ish Holocaust survivors from
Poland, was born in Germany in 1948, but raised in Buffalo, N.Y. He was named Wolf after his
maternal grandfather. His father was a homebuilder and
the family led an upwardly mobile, middle-class lifestyle. “He wasn’t very successful to begin with,” Blitzer said, “but eventually he did very well. It was a time in the 1950s and ’60s after World War II when people were buy- ing homes, so he started buying land in some of the suburbs of Buffalo.” Wolf majored in history at the State University of New York at Buffalo and
“Ever since I first went on TV on CNN 22 years ago, it’s been the name and the beard.”
for him. While at Johns Hopkins, he studied abroad at the Hebrew Univer- sity of Jerusalem and learned Hebrew. “I fell into journalism and I liked it,” he said. He was hired by the Reuters news agency in Israel. Later, Blitzer was the first journal-
ist to interview Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. naval analyst convicted of spying for Israel in the 1980s. “I try to be as competitive as I can,”
he said, “and it goes back to my early years as a wire service guy when I worked for Reuters and they instilled in me that, if AP or UPI beats you, even by 10 seconds, it’s a big deal.” If Wolf Blitzer is known for any-
thing, it’s his coverage of Middle East conflicts and U.S. politics. He started at CNN in 1990 covering the Penta- gon, then moved on to being a White House correspondent during the Clin- ton administration. He’s hosted The Situation Room from D.C. since 2005, commuting every day from his home in Maryland where he lives with his wife of 38 years, Lynn. They have a 30-year-old daughter. Blitzer covered his first presiden-
EYE ON THE STORM Blitzer covering Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
then earned a masters degree in inter- national relations at Johns Hopkins. But a career in diplomacy was not
tial campaign in 1980 — the election Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan — and his enthusiasm for covering the campaigns every four years has never waned. There’s something else old- school about Wolf Blitzer where poli- tics is concerned: His own politics or biases are impossible to discern, even by those who know him well. “He’s a journalist’s journalist,” said Sam Feist, CNN’s Washington bureau chief. “I worked with him for 17 years” as a producer, Feist said, “[and] I have no idea what his politics are and that’s the way it should be.” Frank Sesno added: “There is something else about him that is not to be dismissed: Wolf is a genuinely nice guy. He relishes the fame, but he is approachable, and I’ve never heard him utter a bad word about anybody.”
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