Brooke Baldwin

Brooke Baldwin is an American television news anchor and journalist, who is based in New York. She works for CNN (Cable News Network), and has been with them since 2008. Currently, she is the host of CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, a 2 hour show starting at 2 pm Eastern time.

Early Life

Baldwin was born on July 12, 1979 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. She went to The Westminster Schools, a private school focused on college preparatory courses.  The school educates children from preschool through 12th grade, and has one of the largest endowments of any non-boarding school in the United States. It is a very challenging school to attend, with a small number of students, and a very difficult learning program. The school only graduates about two hundred students a year, many of whom are admitted to top colleges like Harvard and Princeton; thus, Baldwin had a challenging, though privileged, education in her early years.

The Westminster Schools also has a strict honor code, enforced by the students themselves, that forbids lying, cheating, and stealing, and provided Baldwin with a good moral base. The school has produced a number of famous actors, athletes, authors, and musicians; in addition to journalists like Baldwin. Brooke Baldwin also attended the United States Space Camp during her school years. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but also studied at Universidad Iberoamericana  in Mexico City during her time as an undergraduate. This private university, also known as Ibero-American University, is one of the most prestigious schools in Latin America.

In 2001, Baldwin graduated with a double Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Spanish from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That same year, she began her career in journalism by working at WVIR-TV in Charlottesville, Virginia. Throughout her career she has worked in various capacities; she was the morning anchor at WOWK-TV in the West Virginia area of Huntington and Charleston as well as working as lead reporter for the 10 pm newscast on the WTTG news channel, in Washington D.C.  She has also worked for several other news agencies, the most well-known being CNN (Cable News Network).

CNN

Before working for CNN, Baldwin worked for seven years paying her dues at smaller television news stations, then, in 2008, she took a big leap and joined CNN, the biggest international news channel. This move changed her career for the better. First and foremost, she was a contributor assisting the Rick Sanchez list show. In 2010 Sanchez was fired for allegedly making anti-Semitic comments, and Baldwin occupied the vacant chair. Apart from her popularity as a famous news reporter, she has successfully hosted Soundcheck, the 30 minute special musical program. It features celebrities like Staples, Mavis, Mumford & Sons, Janelle Monae and Ben Solle. Baldwin hosts the CNN Newsroom from 2 pm to 4 pm ET. She has covered a variety of international stories and presented big events across the globe. She successfully reported on Osama Bin Laden’s death, the chaos in Syria, tsunami impact in Japan, savage killing in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and the 2011 presidential election. She also co-anchored the network’s special coverage of the last launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, live from Kennedy Space Center.

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Baldwin has covered the inaugurations of the most recent United States Presidents; Obama’s in 2013, and Trump’s in 2017, reporting from Washington, D.C. She was a part of the team (with Piers Morgan) that covered Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee in London, UK. Some of the other famous stories she has covered are the Benghazi attack, World’s untold stories (forgotten Mayan city), and Arab Spring. She also covered the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub attack, the largest mass shooting in the United States, live from Orlando, Florida. In addition, she has interviewed numerous renowned celebrities and personalities, including Steve Buscemi and Lena Dunham.More recently, Baldwin has participated in Champions of Change, a CNN showcase of non-profit organizations. She chose to highlight The Heroes Project.

Controversy

Baldwin generally has not generated much controversy from her reporting, with the exception of some criticism she received for comments made during her coverage of the Baltimore protests in 2015.  She incorrectly attributed comments she heard that veterans were responsible for the unrest and said that soldiers who become police officers "are coming back from war, they don't know the communities, and they're ready to do battle." The day after the comments, she apologized on-air for her error, as well as posting an apology on Twitter. She earned the forgiveness of the public for the way she handled the situation, as well as compliments from other journalists. Erik Wemple of the Washington Post even wrote an article about it, called, "CNN's Brooke Baldwin shows rest of media how to apologize".

Awards

Baldwin has been recognized with nominations and awards over the years. In 2012, she won a Silver World Medal for Best Investigative Report at the New York Festivals International Television & Film Awards for her documentary, “To Catch a Killer”. In 2014, her coverage of the protests after Eric Garner’s death in New York City was nominated for an Emmy award. She was also a part of the Peabody Award winning team that covered the Gulf oil spill disaster and West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch coal mine collapse. In 2017, Baldwin was featured in a Variety magazine article "Women Surge to Top of TV News in Face of Sexism".

Before an interview, Baldwin believes in making the interviewee feel comfortable and easy. She truly believes in building a rapport and this style has helped her garner many loyal fans. She takes up the cause of social issues, like child abuse, and talks about ways to help. Baldwin is a very dedicated, hardworking and loyal journalist, and it comes as no surprise that she is one of the top-ranked news anchors.

Personal

Baldwin is a popular news correspondent and is much admired for her beauty and fashion sense. From 1997 to 2013, Baldwin was married to Christian Carino, with whom she has two daughters. In 2018, she married English producer James Fletcher, her long-term boyfriend. Baldwin and Fletcher met in 2015 and got engaged during a trip to Hawaii; many of Baldwin’s CNN colleagues were at the wedding, including Poppy Harlow, Dana Bash, Don Lemon, and Wolf Blitzer. Brooke Baldwin walked down the aisle to one of the couple’s favorite songs, “Love’s Divine,” by Seal; she says “There wasn’t a dry eye, including James and myself! I’ll never, ever forget that moment when our eyes locked. I wanted to run towards him.”

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