- They come into our homes regularly, people we think we know because we see them on television all the time.

But today's guest reveals a complex personal backstory to the familiar face we've watched on television, even as she remembers 9/11, and one of the moments that made her a household name.

She's Carol Lin this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(cheerful music) (cheerful music continues) (cheerful music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is someone you probably recognize.

Carol Lin is an award-winning journalist, and was for a long time an anchor and correspondent for CNN and ABC News.

She's also the author of a movie, new memoir, "When News Breaks."

She's joining us today from Hawaii.

Carol, thank you so much for being with us.

- Hi, Jim.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

- I have to tell you, "When News Breaks" is a tremendous read, and we're gonna talk about it at some length, but do you wanna give us just a quick, that 30,000-foot overview of it?

- Most readers might come to the book "When News Breaks" thinking that it's going to be the story of a gonzo journalist.

And there are parts of it that, of course, meet that standard and expectation.

But really, Jim, it's a complicated love story with an older newsman and a career that brought us together.

It was the news that we loved, and it was the news that, in so many ways, pulled us apart and tested us.

And I think "When News Breaks" is really about what happens when news breaks in life against the backdrop of a journalism career.

- A lot of meanings to that title.

So, you know, I think that anybody who watches television thinks that, particularly with news anchors, that we kind of know them because we invite them into our house every day, and we get familiar with them a little bit, we think.

What's the reality of the relationship for you as an anchor who was seen nationally by millions and millions of people every day?

What's the kind of relationship that you actually have with the audience?

- It's a relationship that is very carefully curated.

You know, in my career, it is very specific, frankly, to me being a woman and an Asian American journalist when there were very few on the air.

It is a relationship that I carefully crafted, because I wanted you, Jim, the audience, to believe me to be credible, and to believe that you could trust me, and that I had the experience and the gravitas to bring you the biggest stories of the day.

But when an individual, a human being behind the camera faces the enormity of the job, the pressures, the expectations, the personal expectations and ambitions and motivations that brought us to that anchor chair, or to that live shot on the Afghanistan border, that is a very different story.

And that's a story that I wanted to tell in this book.

- And you tell it well.

So what drew you to journalism and broadcast journalism in the first place?

- Oh my gosh.

(Jim chuckles) I wanted every day to be different.

I had an insatiable curiosity from the time I was a child.

And, you know, a cautionary tale, because those two things, be careful for what you wish for, because every day was different.

But honestly, in writing this memoir, in writing "When News Breaks," I realized how big a role my parents played in this decision.

It was a push and pull.

It was a rebellion against my traditional Chinese mother's warning, that words would never love me back, with my traditional Chinese father's American ambitions, that his daughter could be anything that she wanted to be.

And from my earliest days with him, from the time I was four years old, and he ordered that first set of "Encyclopedia Britannica" and lined them up on the shelf, and told me that, "You could literally have all the knowledge in the world."

That's what a little girl believes when her father tells her that.

And so it was the push and pull of proving my mother wrong, proving my dad right, sort of, in my own way, living and writing and broadcasting his unfinished story because of the sacrifice that he made to come to this country.

- You know, so the through line in the story, which tracks your career, and we wanna talk about some of those moments as well, but it is the relationship with your first husband, Will Robinson.

How did you meet?

- Oh.

It was a classic, (laughs) it was a classic meet-cute in Iowa at the Iowa Convention Center, covering the presidential campaign kickoff.

And he was- - This was 1988?

- Yeah, it was in 1988.

- Okay.

- That was a classic campaign.

And I was there, 26, 27 years old, a field producer for a satellite news company that nobody had ever heard of.

(laughs) And he was a client station.

He was the senior political producer for KRON-TV in San Francisco.

And he literally almost knocked me down the first time we met.

He was this dynamic older newsman who was just nothing but trouble in my life (Jim laughs) because I had something to prove on this assignment, and he had his just wild, charismatic, charming ways.

So he was making my life very difficult.

But there was this incredible attraction, you know?

And my editor, my publisher, said, "Oh my gosh, you know, whether it was the love letters the two of you ended up writing to each other after Iowa, meeting in Iowa, or how you write about the relationship, Carol, it is so intertwined with the work."

And I really think it was just our love of journalism that brought us together.

- Yeah.

- So whether the attraction... The attraction was 360.

And I think, ironically, the work was at the core of it.

- You know, so Carol, you know, one of the fascinating things here is that you're both working in the news industry, but you're working on opposite sides of the country.

And I wonder how do you manage both the professional pressures of working in a very intense industry with building a relationship?

This isn't about the news, this is sort of like, how do you make a transcontinental relationship work?

- (laughs) Not a conversation I expected to have on PBS.

(Jim laughs) (faintly speaking) Jim.

(both laughing) You know, I think in the news business, we're so used to transacting across phone lines and across live shots, and distance doesn't really matter when it comes to people in television, that we're all connected by our love of journalism and the technology itself and air travel.

So what we would do to explore a relationship, I mean, back in the day, it was pre-internet, and we would write these love letters to each other, making plans, and just booking travel, and me so excited to go.

Remember, I was just starting in my career, and I was off air as a field producer.

So I was putting my resume tape together in Washington, DC, but I would fly to San Francisco.

And that was my first big exposure, was to Will's newsroom, major market newsroom, in San Francisco, KRON-TV, where, you know, I had an encounter with their brand-new anchor, Sylvia Chase.

Some of your viewers might remember her from network television.

And she was gonna be the big local star in San Francisco.

And in that first meeting, Sylvia ate me alive, (Jim laughs) but, you know, good lesson, right?

Anyway, so that's how we made it work- - Yeah.

- You know, when it comes to television.

Look at you and I. I'm in Hawaii, you're in Rhode Island, and the internet has just brought us that much closer together.

- Yeah.

So- - So I think there's that intimacy.

Yeah.

- You know, when you think about that sort of period in your life, and the growth of your career, in a relationship with someone who's already established in the industry, are there special challenges in terms of protecting your own place in the industry, or do you risk becoming sort of the follower in terms of the relationship?

- You know, that's a really good question, and I think that it goes to two things.

One, you know, I know, for some of your viewers, there might be shades in 2026, in the modern era, of a Me Too moment.

And a friend of mine in the business, in the news business, had said to me when she read my beta copy, you know, "Thank goodness, Carol, you were not two years younger or three years younger, because then there would be questions about this."

But truth be told, for all of us who traveled, and, you know, when you're on the road, all bets are off.

This is a tricky question, because I buy into my life as that love story, where we met, I was 26, 27, he was 10 years older, he was much more experienced.

He took an interest in my career.

And I not only wanted that professional interest, but I needed his help, and I didn't ask for it, and he didn't so much offer.

I think the help that he offered evolved with our relationship.

So as we got deeper into our relationship, he knew that he wanted me to move to the Bay Area in California.

And so how were we gonna make that happen?

I was gonna be the one doing the work in Washington, DC, putting a resume tape together, sending it out to the sources that he had.

And at the same time, you know, he would drive my resume tape around to all the different stations, and drop my tape off with his business card, not intimating that we had a personal connection, but just saying, you know, "Take a look at this reporter.

I think she's terrific."

- You know- - So maybe back in the day, it wasn't as nuanced.

I certainly didn't feel anything but joy in being in that moment and the possibilities for both my personal life and my professional life.

- Yeah, so as your relationship evolves and your career grows, you both face challenges, both personal and professional, that you write very candidly about in the book.

For folks- - Yes.

- Who haven't read it yet, what do they need to know about those challenges in your relationship?

- So once you realize, which will happen pretty quickly in the book, that this is a love story between two journalists who found each other through the news.

And when I say that it was the news that brought us together, that was Iowa.

When I say that it was the news that almost tore us apart, that was the America's Cup in the early '90s, where Will, as a senior manager in local news in the second-largest market, Los Angeles, was seeing the writing on the wall, that instead of doing award-winning investigative documentaries for which he won many Emmys, they were asking him to do series on online dating with the new anchor.

You know, the shift was dramatic for him in terms of the ratings war.

And so before the news business could leave him, he decided to leave the news business, join, of all things, the America's Cup, which was making news with the first all-female team to sail.

And he became their director of communications.

At the same time, I was interviewing at ABC News to be a network correspondent.

I was a local reporter dreaming big.

ABC News was absolutely my number one dream choice, to work for Peter Jennings.

And so I was interviewing, and it looked like they were gonna make me an offer.

So I raced down to San Diego, where Will was working, on the America's Cup.

I couldn't wait to tell him the news.

And he had news of his own, Jim.

So there was a late-night party, a sexual encounter with a young woman, a stranger.

And ABC News, the very network that I was interviewing with, happened to be sending an investigative team to do a story about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

And when they got wind of this encounter, there was the iconic chasing Will up the driveway shot, "No comment," things of that nature, and a brand-new magazine show that ABC News was launching that week.

So I go down to tell my husband of one month, we had just been married, that I was about to get a job offer from my number-one network.

And he was telling me that he was being investigated by that very same entity.

- Yeah.

- And in that moment, that is when my world collided.

For so long as a young woman, I had seen myself through the eyes of his eyes and the eyes of others.

And eventually, when I was offered a job at ABC, that my identity was going to be in that black-and-white contract.

It was gonna be written in print who I was and literally what I was worth.

And that is the arc of the story, part of it, is reconciling- - Yeah.

- That I needed to see myself through my work.

And work became, if it wasn't an addiction already, it became the addiction that I was devoted to because I could count on myself.

If I couldn't count on the person that I loved the most, then I could count on the work, and the work became everything.

And that life, living on airplanes, going from one breaking news story to another, I will never get the days, hours, weeks I spent on JonBenet Ramsey and whatever happened to that little girl.

(Jim and Carol chuckle) I mean, that was my life- - Yeah.

- Living on the road.

- You know- - And- Yeah.

- The candor with which you discuss these aspects of your marriage are really powerful.

Your career was progressing at the same time.

And I think a lot of Americans may still remember you as the face that told them that something had happened at the World Trade Center, that a plane had flown into it.

I wanna come back to that in just a second, but it's not long after that that you find out that you're pregnant, but then Will gets a very dire diagnosis.

- That was one of the hardest scenes to write.

And I credit my writing community for carrying me through that moment, because when you write the scene of a critical diagnosis of someone you love, you're back in it.

And something my publisher had said to me when she read those pages was, "How we view time, there is the moment before and the moment after."

So you mentioned 9/11, and I know we're gonna be talking about that.

- Yeah.

- But the moment before 9/11 was 8:45 AM.

And that 8:45 AM in my life was a beautiful day, just as 9/11 was a beautiful day.

And to get that phone call, and me asking, "So what did the doctor say?

It's just a toothache."

And for him to tell me that it was cancer, it was like time stopping.

And the metaphor in "When News Breaks" is when I just said, "There it is," that moment that so many journalists face in the edit bay, where you're impersonally toggling video back and forth to find the endpoint for your shot, where does your story begin?

And so many people relate to that moment, Jim, of what it was like the moment before they got the news in their own lives.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- And I wanted that scene to be an exploration of that, to be relatable, that it wasn't trauma dumping about the diagnosis my husband was facing when we were six months pregnant.

That alone is difficult to embrace, but that relatable moment of feeling time pass and how we experience all the moments leading up to right before your life changes in some fundamental way.

And- - And so it's fascinating to hear you talk about it in that way, because as I was thinking about sort of some of the themes in the book, I was thinking about how time passes, because you talk about, you know, the passage of time when you're in the crosshairs of a Taliban fighter.

You talk about the passage of time when you're on the air, and you're being very cognizant of how long before your next out.

You talk about the passage of time in a new relationship, when everything is going wonderfully, and the passage of time when things are not going so wonderfully.

And so was that an intentional theme that you pulled through, or did that just emerge in the writing?

- It emerged in the writing.

And I think that is the magic of memoir, that you set out writing something, and then it begins to write itself in so many ways, and you begin to detect patterns only upon revision, when your editor has eyes on it, when your beta readers have eyes on it.

- Yeah.

- And then you realize what has been really important, how you experience your life.

And for me, you know, you understand this too, being on the air, we are super hypersensitive to the passage of time.

I bet if you recorded a 10-second track, a narration, and somebody said, "Well, we need to add an extra word.

So Jim, can you retract that, but it still has to be 10 seconds?"

You can do it.

We are so conditioned to the passage of time that it's a physical sensation in our body.

And so I thought it was a blessing and interesting that when I wrote the book "When News Breaks" in its entirety, that the passage of time became such an important anchor and metaphor for how I was moving through these different experiences.

- So you write in your prologue that, "This is the story behind the headlines that I was certain I'd carry to my grave."

Why did you decide to put it in print?

- So putting it in print was definitely the decision.

Publishing was never gonna be certain, because, Jim, when I realized I needed to finish the book that I had started when I left CNN in 2008, and now, fast-forward, it's 2023.

And my daughter is 20 years old, and she is facing the same decisions that I made early in my life.

She's graduating college, she's ending her first big relationship, she has questions about that.

She has questions about a meaningful life and a career.

And she's facing all these decisions, terrified she's gonna make a mistake.

And I wanted her to know that the curated version of her mother, so you and I talked about the curated version that we put out to the audience.

- [Jim] Yeah.

- But it's the same presentation, I think, that I had raising her, "Do as I do, and I'm gonna show you how," but it was time to drop that veil.

And I wanted Chloe to know the whole story.

I wanted her to know everything about her biological father, and I wanted her to know that the mother that she loves is imperfect, and that she's gonna make mistakes just like I made mistakes, and she's gonna have regrets that maybe I have, but the imperfect life is the path to a life well lived.

And I just want her to give herself permission to live her life to the fullest, not to the state of perfection.

And so that's what I wanted for her.

It was a leadership of one.

- Well, I hope it's a substantially greater readership of one now, and it's a remarkable read.

I wanna ask you about some of the stuff you're doing now, because you've got a Substack, which is whennewsbreaks.substack.com, where you're chronicling sort of that same passage of time, right, that before moment and that after moment, for people, normal Americans, everyday Americans who lived through 9/11.

Tell us a little bit about that project.

- What a fantastic project.

It's really a public call for personal essays or stories, some people I've interviewed because it makes them more comfortable, and other people submitted their own essays.

Each is only 400 words, and they range from a former Army interrogator, who had started a new life escorting Muslim clients through medical care in the United States when 9/11 broke.

And suddenly, he had to get them out of the country because Islamophobia became very real.

And then he was pulled back into the life that he had wanted to leave behind as an Army interrogator, to go on national television and address the questions around the torture systems at Abu Ghraib, to a simple story about a woman who was ice skating in New York City when the towers were hit.

And she was ice skating in a facility that would become a morgue for the City of New York.

And her feelings about that and this kind of dystopian disconnect from the reality of what was happening around her, which happened for a lot of people.

Like people said, "Surely, this can't be what it may be," because they were in denial.

And so she continued skating, or a woman went out hiking, but through that process, and processing the enormity of that day later in life, and that's where the magic is.

I know we've all told our stories of where we were when.

- Right.

- But it's years later, 25 years later this year, Jim- - Yeah.

- That people reflect on how that day changed and shaped them to who they are today.

And the resilience they developed from that day served them well.

A young doctor who had to save her own life during COVID, isolated in a hotel room, and she draws her resilience from what she experienced on 9/11.

- Yeah, and so I- - It's extraordinary.

- So, you know, you lived that history sort of in the public eye.

And it wasn't long after that that you found yourself volunteering for, you know, reporting duties, you know, in the conflict zone.

This is a question I've always wondered about.

What draws people, what draws journalists to the sound of the guns?

- First chapter of history, the curiosity of not knowing what's gonna happen next, and then a body of experience that enures you emotionally and sometimes physically to the danger that other people say, "Why are you going there of all places?"

And I think it's just an insatiable desire to be part of that first chapter of history.

It's the work.

And for those today who think that they're gonna go into the news business because it's a way to get on camera to become an influencer, and I see this online, and it makes me crazy.

(Jim laughs) And my daughter always tells me, "Don't pick fights on the internet, Mom."

And I'm not gonna pick a fight.

I'm trying to say, "Listen, if you're trying to develop your brand, don't pursue journalism, because it's gonna ask more of you than it's ever gonna give back"- - Yeah.

- "In so many ways, to your friends and your family.

It's gonna steal you, your heart, your head, your time, your life.

What's it gonna be worth for you to pay that price for a season?

And so you just gotta want it, you just gotta want the story, and you've gotta be the one to want to not only tell the story, but be the one trusted to tell that story."

- You know, we've literally got about a minute left here, but I'm curious.

You've worked, obviously, in front of the camera, you've worked behind the camera, you've taught at one of the great journalism schools in the country, at USC.

What's your current take on the current state of journalism in general and broadcast news in particular?

- Capitulation is the word that comes to mind, and we're seeing it every time they settle a lawsuit with the Trump administration, and that is painful to watch.

However, there are things happening on the local level, and I want your viewers to really explore this.

Hyper-local journalism is alive, and it's gonna be well, and there's money behind it too.

Here in Hawaii, there's something called Civil Beat.

It's funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who stays below the radar, he doesn't need the headlines, but they are carving out a niche in investigative journalism and holding local government accountable.

And you're seeing that in cities across America.

Look for the nonprofits that are funding these efforts.

Support National Public Radio and PBS, because there is a standard of journalism there like no other.

And you have to have a trusted source.

We need a national campfire to gather around.

Consider other sources, but let's seek the heat and the light together.

- That is a tremendous point.

Carol Lin, "When News Breaks," thank you so much for being with us this week.

That is all the time we have, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you too for spending some of your time with us this week.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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