NBC News reporter Katy Tur discusses her book on the 2016 presidential election at Brennan Center for Justice event

In her recent book, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History, NBC News reporter Katy Tur recounts her experience covering Donald J. Trump’s campaign for president in the 2016 election. At a recent event sponsored by NYU Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, Tur spoke with Irin Carmon (co-author, with Shana Knizhnik ’15, of Notorious RBG) about what she witnessed on the campaign trail and how she felt about being publicly singled out by Trump and by some of his supporters.                                                 

Select remarks:

Irin Carmon: “You quote a colleague of yours who says ‘you are not the story,’ the news is the story…. But he made you the story. So what did that feel like? …He’s essentially leading a crowd in a chant against you. He’s whipping up the crowd to say ‘Katy is lying.’ How did you navigate doing your job while this was all happening?”

Katy Tur: “I didn’t want it to be about me, I wanted it to be about my reporting, but he did keep dragging me in…. I think it’s important for people to understand what it’s like for an American journalist to follow an American politician and to need armed security while doing that, that’s not something we should normalize, that’s not something we should overlook. I wrote it down to put it on the record so that people years from now will remember that this happened in 2016, that our politics got so vile, so angry, so dangerous, that people’s lives were threatened.” 

Brennan Center President Michael Waldman ’86: “The Washington Post publisher Philip Graham is famous for having said, ‘Journalism is the first rough draft of history,’ and this book more than lives up to that…. Future historians will turn to this book as a really valuable document about this campaign and the country at this moment.”

Watch the full video of this event (1 hr, 14 min): 

Posted December 12, 2017