MAKEUPBYTODDH
ARRISFOR^ SALLY
HARL
OR56 | Rolling Stone | March 2020
SOLEDAD
O’BRIEN
Women
Shaping
The
FutureAfter a new executive pushed
her out at CNN, she became
one of the mainstream media’s
biggest critics By EJ DicksonSOLEDAD
O’Brien likes to
tell a story: Elev-
en years ago, a
senior employee
at CNN — “my
boss’s boss’s
boss” — called
her into his office
to upbraid her about a comment she had made
while promoting her multipart series Black in
America. At a panel, O’Brien had said she had
interviewed black parents from various socio-
economic backgrounds, all of whom said they
had conversations with their sons about how to
navigate interactions with police. The superior,
who was white, told her this experience was not
specific to people of color, and that white par-
ents had this discussion with their sons too. He
requested that she stop publicly speaking about
young black men and police brutality.
O’Brien was stunned. “I’d spent 18 months
working on that doc,” the veteran journalist
recalls in the office of her company, Soledad
O’Brien Productions. “But the idea that I would
come back with something that challenged his
belief was just not acceptable.” Nonetheless,
she wanted to keep her job, and she knew that
speaking out would be career suicide. “I didn’t
tell that story,” she says. “Until I was telling it on
Twitter.” And once she started telling stories,
she found she couldn’t stop.
For the first 25 years of her career, O’Brien,
53, was a high-profile broadcast journalist,
winning Peabodys for her coverage of Hurricane
Katrina and the BP oil spill, and gracing the
pages of People’s 50 Most Beautiful list. Yet over
the past few years, she has become one of estab-
lishment media’s most fiery critics. On Twitter,
where she has more than a million followers,
O’Brien regularly blasts outlets for coverage
that minimizes the threats posed by Trump’s
administration. “A hot mess,” she tweeted about
a CNN interview with a Trump-supporting con-
gressional candidate. Of a quote from New York
Times executive editor Dean Baquet about how
Trump’s victory was impossible for the media to
predict: “This, folks, is bullshit.”
Early in her career, O’Brien, the daughter of
an Afro Cuban mother and an Irish Australian
father, graduated from local NBC affiliates in
Boston and San Francisco to MSNBC and NBC;
when she was pregnant (she has two daughtersPHOTOGRAPH BY Leeor Wild