News Side

Linda Vester Hosts the News — Live

by Jean Hennelly Keith

	Linda Vester, host of DaySide. Photograph courtesy of Fox News Channel

On a recent broadcast, Linda Vester and her live onstage audience examined the address to Congress by Iraq’s interim prime minister, two U.S. representatives’ differing takes on the state of affairs in Iraq, terrorist manipulation of the Web to incite global fear, mud-slinging television presidential campaign ads, the voting rights of citizens with dementia, the impact of bloggers on the upcoming presidential election, the memo scandal regarding the president’s military service documents, and on the lighter side, an encounter between Elton John and reporters at a Taiwan airport — all in sixty minutes, including commercials. That’s just business as usual for the host of Fox News Channel’s new interactive news show DaySide with Linda Vester. For a rapid-fire hour each weekday, Vester (COM’87) tackles a provocative agenda, interviewing guests, usually with opposing views, while relevant footage from hot spots around the world runs on split screens. Deftly juggling interviews and audience questions, encouraging viewer feedback, and sprinkling humor throughout, she takes her role as both news journalist and entertainer seriously.

Describing herself as “as wonk, a nerd, and a news junkie,” Vester reads constantly. “There’s really nothing exciting or juicy on my nightstand,” she admits. “You’re likely to find a foreign affairs journal.” Vester is married and the mother of a one-and-a-half-year-old. “When I’m not on air or changing a diaper,” she says, “I’m reading. My BlackBerry is attached to my hand, and I’m constantly checking the Internet for news.”

Her voracious interest in international affairs began during her undergraduate years studying with Hermann Eilts, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and now a University Professors Program professor emeritus. As her faculty advisor, he encouraged her to apply for a Fulbright scholarship, and winning it enabled her to pursue Middle East studies and learn Arabic in Egypt from 1988 to 1989. “I had no idea how relevant it would be,” she says.

Attracted to broadcast journalism early on, Vester began her career as a jack-of-all-trades at a news station in Kearney, Nebraska. In 1990 she moved to NBC in New York as a researcher and producer, advancing through a variety of posts around the country. When the Gulf War broke out, Vester, then a reporter for NBC affiliate WFLA-TV in Tampa, Florida, was sent to the Persian Gulf — chosen especially for her background in Middle East affairs. At twenty-four one of the youngest news correspondents covering Operation Desert Storm, she saw death and destruction up close. “I was too young and naïve to be scared,” she says. “In retrospect, I shudder.” Seeing the corpses of torture victims at a morgue in Kuwait City was a life-changing experience, she says. During the Rwandan genocide, she was among the first television reporters to arrive in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where victims pleadingly grasped her ankles as they died in the streets. Despite putting in hard time in hard places, Vester says that the risk for foreign correspondents these days is much greater than it was for her. “Between then and now, there’s been a huge explosion of Islamic extremism,” she says. “Our generation is going to have to face that and defeat it.”

She became anchor of MSNBC’s Today in America and from 1996 to 1998 of NBC’s News at Sunrise. In 1999 she joined Fox as host of Fox News Live, interviewing the famous and infamous, including a rare talk with O. J. Simpson. Now as host of DaySide’s live audience newscast, she relishes the intellectual challenge of absorbing, digesting, and articulating information for her audiences. “My brain is getting a constant workout,” she says. “I love the interaction with my viewers, who are from all walks of life. I feed off their energy. I get a better sense of how Americans think in other parts of the country, and I’m grateful.”