[MUSIC FADES IN]
Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, one journalist's story about how her unconventional upbringing shaped her life and career.
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[TENSE MUSIC]
Katy Tur spent much of her childhood in a helicopter.
Katy Tur: I grew up 500 to a thousand feet over Los Angeles, in the sky.
Basu, Narrating: Katy's parents, Bob and Marika Tur, were trailblazers in the journalism world. They revolutionized the breaking news model and were fiercely committed to being first on the scene. Which meant literally flying over the competition in their own chopper.
[START ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
[HELICOPTER ROTOR BLADES WHIRRING]
Bob Tur: Oh, good. That'll look good for the live shot. I'm going live in a second. Standby, everybody. Quiet.
[END ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: Together, they co-founded a media company called Los Angeles News Service. And from the late '70s into the '90s, they captured some of the most iconic breaking news footage of all time, like the 1992 L.A. riots …
[START ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
[HELICOPTER ROTOR BLADES WHIRRING]
Bob Tur: Newscopter 13 has been fired upon by people with guns down below.
[END ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: The O.J. Simpson Bronco police chase …
[START ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
News Anchor: [VOICE FADES IN] … up ahead. That's Bob Tur up in Chopper 2. Bob, do you believe that to be O.J. Simpson down there below you?
Bob Tur: Hang on a second. We are following … [VOICE FADES OUT]
[END ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: That footage of Madonna's wedding to Sean Penn in 1985, where she's holding a middle finger up to the sky? That's the Turs, flying overhead.
And a lot of the, time Katy and her younger brother were along for the ride.
Katy Tur: I spent more time in a helicopter than I did my own bed. My parents had car seats strapped into the helicopter. And I remember feeling really lucky for a lot of my childhood to see Los Angeles, my city, in a way nobody else got to see it.
Basu, Narrating: But as thrilling as it all was, there was a darkness to her childhood as well.
Katy Tur: I also have memories of plastering over the holes in the walls in my house because my dad would get so angry, he'd punch through them.
Basu, Narrating: Despite the more painful parts of her upbringing, Katy says, it's made her the person she is today. She's now a journalist herself. She's an anchor on "MSNBC" — her show is called "Katy Tur Reports" — and she's a correspondent for "NBC News." She's also got a new memoir out now called "Rough Draft." In it, she draws a line from the past to the present and talks about how her childhood and family life has helped her make sense of this current moment in history and how to cover it.
In our conversation, we started by talking about how her parents ended up getting that helicopter in the first place.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Katy Tur: They were stringers, which meant that they would go and try to gather news stories overnight when the regular news stations weren't working, and they'd sell that video back to the stations. And they quickly learned that being the fastest to a breaking news story meant they would get the best video and meant they would make the most money. So, in order to get places fast in Los Angeles, a car is not the best option because there's so much traffic and it's also just a giant city. It's hard to get from one place to another. If there's a fire, by the time you got there, usually the flames were out. So, they said, let's start gathering all of the news in Los Angeles from the air. So, they leased a plane at first, but that wasn't easy to shoot video out of. And then my dad had the idea to get a helicopter. And so, at 25, he walked into a helicopter company's offices and said, I think you should give me a lease. I don't have any money, but I have this idea, and I have this camerawoman and she's a girl. And they laughed him out of the place. They said, "What are you doing? Get outta here, you kid. Don't waste our time."
Basu: The camerawoman being your mother, right? [LAUGHS]
Katy Tur: My mom, yeah. [LAUGHS] Here's my business plan. The business manager is grandma, and the camera woman is mom. And so, he went to another place. And this one, I think he probably tuned up his pitch a bit. And this one bit, they said, "Yeah, we'll give you a helicopter. Sure, you have no money. Who cares? But we like this idea." And so, they gave him a helicopter. He then learned how to fly it from the fire department, befriended somebody over there. And they started gathering news from the air in Los Angeles. And they covered, if not the very first, then it was the second live police chase, and they covered it start to finish. The local station broke into daytime television. They broke into an episode of "Matlock" to air this chase live. And in the morning when the ratings came in, the chase beat "Matlock" and Los Angeles from then on was hooked.
Basu: So, I watched the documentary about your parents called "Whirlybird," which came out in 2020. And there are times when you hear this little voice chirping in from the background, and you realize, okay, there's a kid in the backseat and I guess that's Katy.
[START WHIRLYBIRD DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
[SIRENS AND RADIO FEEDBACK]
Young Katy: I hear it! I see it!
Bob Tur: Okay, he's making a turn. You got him?
Young Katy: I see the red light!
[END WHIRLYBIRD DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu: So, tell us a little bit about what it was like for you experiencing this as a child, having a backseat to all these incredible news stories.
Katy Tur: My mom says some of my first words were "smoke showing."
Basu: [LAUGHS] Oh, my goodness.
Katy Tur: Well, I knew when a scanner, when you heard the words "smoke showing" that there was a story. So, I'd yell "story, story," and I'd go along with my parents. If I saw sirens, then I knew that there was something happening, and I would point in the direction. I found it so exciting because we were on this adventure. We were on this chase. What kid is not in love with flashing lights? That was me. The news business was very much a part of everything in our lives. It was who we were and what we did. It was very much a part of my identity.
Basu: So, in the documentary, we're hearing your voice. You're chirping in from the back. And it sounds like, I mean, clearly, you're having a lot of fun a lot of times, and you're taking cues from your parents in chasing these stories, and they're having a lot of fun too. But now tell me about some of the parts of your childhood that, as you said, you didn't love.
Katy Tur: So, this is what makes it hard because those memories that I had chasing the news and yelling, "story, story," when we saw smoke showing and feeling like I was on a great, big, wild adventure that only I got to be on with my parents, like we were special. What makes it hard, because as much as I love those memories and I love sharing them with people, I also have memories of plastering over the holes in the walls in my house because my dad would get so angry, he'd punch through them. I have memories of my dad yelling at my mom, making her cry. I have memories of him yelling at us, my brother and I, scaring us. I have memories of hiding in a bathroom because I'm scared of his rage. I have memories of my mom bleeding because he threw keys at her or punched her, and the glass from her eyeglasses broke off and cut her eyebrow. I also have memories of him patching it up because he was always the hero, always the go-to person in an emergency. If you scraped your knee, he was there to patch it up. But he was also the harm a lot of times. And I found it really difficult to figure out whether I hated him for all of it or loved him for all of the adventure. Because I don't want to, I never wanted to wash away the fun stuff and the love and all of the good of my childhood with the stuff that was all so bad.
Basu: You know, you talk in the book about how your dad could be angry and abusive at times - not just verbally, physically also as you described - and how you considered calling the cops on your father at one point, but you ultimately decided not to, you and your mom decided not to, because Bob Tur had such a recognizable name and the idea of calling the cops on him might actually impact your parents' ability to get work. I would imagine that being such a difficult position to be put in as a partner and as a child.
Katy Tur: I don't think it's an uncommon one, sadly. And I think this is what perpetuates abuse and it's why people don't leave because sometimes, oftentimes, the abuser is the breadwinner. The abuser is the person who's bringing in the money and paying the bills. And while my dad wasn't technically the breadwinner, my mom and my dad had the business together, my dad's name was the more recognizable name for Los Angeles New Service. And if his name was in a police blotter, it would be a story. It would be a story on local news. And it would be hard to recover from that.
[GENTLE MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: In 2013, Katy's father came out as transgender. She now goes by Zoey Tur. When she was a child, Zoey had been abused by her father, and she said that trauma on top of misunderstanding her own identity led to the rage and lashing out that Katy witnessed growing up. In the documentary "Whirlybird," Zoey said that much of her anger dissipated after the transition.
[START WHIRLYBIRD DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Zoey Tur: Bob had a lot of devil because Bob was in a lot of pain. I hate talking in the third person, but it's true, Bob was a really different person. And I can look back and I get so disgusted with myself that I was once that kind of person.
[END WHIRLYBIRD DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: But Katy says, it's been difficult to talk with her dad about the damage that's already been done.
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Katy Tur: Just a note on pronouns, just to be very clear. When I talk about my dad, I talk about him in the past, as in my childhood experiences, everything before 2013, because that's a memory that I'm pulling at. When I talk about my dad, everything after 2013, when she came out to me, it's she. So, I do want to be really clear about how I'm …
Basu: And I'll take your lead on that too.
Katy Tur: … using the pronouns. 'Cause I don't mean to suggest any sort of disrespect or unacceptance. But my dad, yeah, she came out to me in 2013. She said, I'm not who I am. I have been living a lie. I'm not Bob Tur. Bob Tur is dead. And this is a good thing because this is where all the rage came from, and all of the rage is gonna go away. I've got a new lot on life. I'm gonna start with a blank slate. And I remember thinking - 'cause our relationship had been so strained - the violence of my childhood that I had been running away from also kind of meant that I was running away from my dad because I felt like I couldn't talk about it with him at the time. Because if I did, it would just trigger a big fight. And so, I just kept running and running. And I just hated the way that he treated me and my brother, and I hated the way that he treated my mother. So, when she said, "I'm not Bob Tur, Bob Tur is dead," I thought, "Okay, great. That's wonderful." Not the Bob Tur is dead part, but the rage part. That's good. Let's move past it. But I also was cautious because I'd had experiences with one person for my whole life, and this person is telling me that they're gonna be someone completely new. And I was cautious, and I thought, well, let's open up the conversation and let's talk about the rage, figure out the root of it, get past it, move on together. And she didn't wanna do that. And so, our relationship got even more strained.
Basu: And now, after having written this book, I mean, are you two in touch now?
Katy Tur: Not really. And we might be again. I mean I'm hopeful, certainly, I'm always hopeful about the future. I think if you're not hopeful … hope is all, sometimes, you can hang onto. But the relationship is strained, and it continues to be strained because the violence is a sticking point. But you know, it takes two. Estrangement is hard and a lot of Americans deal with it. And I'm not picking up the phone and she's not picking up the phone. And we're at a bit of an impasse.
Basu: Yeah. I'm curious to know when you decided that journalism was gonna be your path. Did it feel like a choice? It really sounds like you were sort of just swimming in it already as a child.
Katy Tur: [LAUGHS] I didn't wanna be a journalist. I …
Basu: You didn't?
Katy Tur: It was fun and adventurous as a little kid, but by the time I got a bit older, I was really embarrassed by my parents. I thought, "Oh God, they're so different from all of the other parents. Why do they have to pick me up from camp in a helicopter?" I mean, it was just these ridiculous thoughts I had in my head because when you're a kid, all you wanna do is be like everybody else, and we were decidedly not like everybody else. My parents would go over my softball games, and they would get on the loudspeaker, and they'd wish me luck or hit a home run.
[SHUMITA CHUCKLES]
Katy Tur: And that was great, but it was also deeply embarrassing. I would hide under the bleachers. And beyond that, I saw the way that the business kind of tore them apart. I thought I don't want that for myself. It's so unstable. I'd like to be something that everyone's always gonna need. I'll be a lawyer. I got a degree in philosophy. But toward the end of college, I thought, I don't really wanna go to school anymore. And I was driving back from my home in Los Angeles to my college in UC Santa Barbara with my boyfriend, and there was a fire in Malibu blocking the highway. And I thought, all I want right now is to be in the middle of that fire. I wanna have all of that smoke surrounding me. I just felt compelled toward it. And I …
Basu: That first instinct. Your first words were …
Katy Tur: Smoke showing, exactly! I saw a smoke showing and I knew there was a story in there, and I wanted to know the story, I wanted to tell the story of the fire. And so, I took a press pass out of my wallet, which my dad had made for me. He'd taken my grandmother's press pass because she was actually a part of Los Angeles News Service, and he had pasted my picture over hers, my 10th grade high school yearbook photo, which he said was fine because I had short hair and it made me look older. And he pasted over every letter of her name but the "Y" - her name was Judy - so I was Y Tur. And I handed it to this officer with the California Highway Patrol and he looked at it, and I thought, for sure he's gonna call bullshit on this press card. I mean, it's so clearly not real.
Basu: [LAUGHS] Y Tur reporting for work.
Katy Tur: Yeah, exactly! He said, "Where's your crew?" And I said, "Oh, they're up ahead." And he let me through. And my boyfriend at the time turned to me and he said, "I've never seen you more confident than you just were lying to that officer." And I thought, oh, I guess I should be a journalist.
[BOTH LAUGH]
Katy Tur: Minus the lying part. But the desire to go see a story.
Basu: You know, it's funny to hear you tell that story because it's so reminiscent of the way that it seems your dad conducted himself in the face of these breaking news moments.
[START WHIRLYBIRD DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Officer: You need a permit for right here.
Bob Tur: No, you don't!
You need a permit. You're in a taxi way.
Bob Tur: No, you don't. No, you don't.
Now, either you do it or I call the law and you're taken off …
Bob Tur: Call the law. Call the law. Okay? Because you are nothing but an imbecile.
[END WHIRLYBIRD DOCUMENTARY ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu: Can you describe that a little bit for our listeners? It seems like he was a really brash and confident guy.
Katy Tur: He was brash. He was very confident. He also knew the law. I mean, he knew the California Penal Code front to back, knew everything. So, he knew where he was allowed to be under the law and where he was not allowed to be. And oftentimes, the cops that he'd encounter didn't have any idea what the actual laws were. And so, he'd bring out the Penal Code, and he would say, "I'm allowed to be here," and he'd fight with them. And sometimes, he would just push his way past and say, "Fine, come arrest me. I'm allowed to be here. I'd love to see you in court." And that meant that he got a lot of great stories. He was exclusive for a lot of big-deal stories. He made gambles. I mean, the night that there was a helicopter crash, they were filming an episode of "The Twilight Zone" and there was a helicopter crash. And Vic Morrow died, who was the star of the show. And two kids died who were extras on the show. And he heard about it, he went to the scene, and a security guard told him he couldn't go any further and pulled a gun on him. And my dad, in the moment, betted that the security guard wouldn't shoot, and he just kept on walking. And he didn't shoot. This was a year before I was born. I mean, I was very close to not being born because of this gamble. But, you know, he knew a news story when he saw one. Not that he wanted to see the death of these actors, it's horrible, but it did help shine a light on conditions and safety procedures on movie sets like this.
Basu: Your parents were certainly trailblazers of sorts in the pursuit of sensational news footage, car chases and all sorts of things that they were well known for, they popularized. Looking back, do you think that they played a problematic role in defining what is news and how we should all consume it?
Katy Tur: So, it's twofold. I think they played an important role in uncovering stories that would've gone unseen. I mean, they have video of police officers just beating the living daylights out of a bunch of immigrants on the side of the road. That stuff would've been swept under the rug, had they not been there covering it. They covered the L.A. riots and showed the Los Angeles police department had abandoned the city, my dad said that on the air. They did some important stuff. But they also popularized - and they didn't do it intentionally - but they popularized reality TV as news. So, these live polices chases without context, sometimes they'd blow out the daytime programming and you'd just cover 'em from start to finish. And often, they'd end in tragedy. And again, there's no context surrounding why this person is running other than what the police might say. It was initially a traffic stop and they didn't stop, and now they're running after 'em. But it was captivating. It was a voyeurism on a city scale. And that, news as reality TV, I think you can draw a straight line from that, arguably, to the way that we cover politics today and more precisely the way that we covered Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016, putting these rallies on live, unedited, in full. We'll give you the context later.
[MELLOW MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: Katy was the first national TV correspondent to cover the Trump campaign full-time, back in 2015. These were the early days of his rallies, and a lot of news channels, including "NBC," were airing them live.
Trump would sometimes single Katy out in the press pen and call her out by name, drawing boos from the crowd.
[START MONTAGE OF ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIPS]
[C-SPAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
President Donald Trump: Little Katy, she's back there. What a lie it was …
[BLOOMBERG TELEVISION ARCHIVAL CLIP]
President Donald Trump: Katy, you're not reporting it, Katy. But there's something happening, Katy.
[C-SPAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
President Donald Trump: Third-rate reporter. Remember that. Third rate.
[CROWD SHOUTING]
[END MONTAGE OF ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIPS]
Basu, Narrating: Katy has talked about how her experience with her father helped prepare her to deal with Trump. Not that they're the same person, but as she puts it in the book, she would recommend the same therapist.
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Basu, Narrating: I asked Katy if she saw a line connecting the news style popularized by her parents - go big and take it live - and the Trump rallies that she was assigned to cover.
Katy Tur: It was starting to crackle while I was covering Trump, 'cause it could feel like what you were watching, it was hard to look away from. You know, what was gonna happen? What was he gonna say? Were the rallies gonna explode in violence? You just couldn't take your eyes off of it because you felt like you were on a roller coaster, and you didn't know when you were gonna go into a loop-de-loop or you were gonna make a sudden drop. The same with the car chases. You never knew when the person leading the chase was gonna, you know, hop a curb and crash into a wall or blow through an intersection and hit a bus. These things would happen at any moment. something spectacular - terrible but spectacular - would happen right in front of you. And you were on the ride, as everybody was. Nobody knew it was what was gonna happen. And the same could be felt about the Trump campaign and the rallies; no one knew what was gonna happen next. So, I had an inkling of it, but I didn't quite know how to describe it at the time. And in the moment, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. You're so in it, it's hard to see whether we as an industry were making a mistake because this was a guy who had captured attention of thousands and then millions and millions and millions of Americans. He was winning primaries. He was tossing the political rule book in the air. He was upending the Republican party. And you wanted to show what was happening. I don't think we fully understood the impact of airing all of that in real time without any guardrails.
Basu: Yeah. What do you see as the guardrails in place today? I guess, what's been learned?
Katy Tur: You know, I don't think we … I know we don't take those rallies any longer. We just take the news from them and …
Basu: You're saying on "NBC."
Katy Tur: Yeah. I think there's very few places that take the rallies in full now. Instead, you take what's newsworthy from whatever he said, or whatever might have happened. And I think if he runs again in 2024, or if somebody runs and uses the same exact playbook, I think that we're gonna have to have some serious conversations about how we air it all.
Basu: Well, Trump and many Republicans continue to promote lies about election fraud in 2020. And in the book, you reflect on how the Big Lie has endured. And you write about this question that you found yourself asking yourself on January 6th, doing live coverage of the insurrection. And the question was, wasn't it my job as a journalist to correct that lie out of existence? I like that phrase that you used.
[KATY LAUGHS]
Basu: "Did I not do my job?" is really what it sounds like you were asking yourself. How do you answer that question?
Katy Tur: I was wondering if I need to quit my job. You know, I was wondering if this is just not working any longer, if there's no way to speak to the country anymore and to tell them the truth and convince them of the truth.
Basu: And I'll just say, I remember being in a newsroom at that time and feeling … a lot of people felt that way. I think there was a really big reckoning that sort of rippled all throughout journalism in that moment.
Katy Tur: Yeah. What are we doing?
Basu: What are we doing?
Katy Tur: And a lot of the trust issues have happened to us. There have been bad actors who have tried to take down our credibility for their own purposes, and there's a whole history of it. But I do think we gotta go back and figure out what have we done to ourselves to lose some of that trust. And I don't have a clean answer to that. I can't tell you here's one thing that we did. I think it's a number of small things that add up to something much larger. So, I don't know how to get that back. I don't know, given the fragmented media landscape we have, where if you wanna hear that the sky is orange, you can find somebody who will tell you the sky is orange. If you wanna hear that porcupines are soft, you can go find someone who will tell you, porcupines are soft. If you wanna hear that COVID doesn't exist, you can find someone telling you that COVID doesn't exist. Now, if you wanna just get the straight truth, that is there for you as well. But what do you do for the millions of people who have no desire to hear that truth, have been convinced or have convinced themselves that that truth is not truth and the people who are pedaling it are actually liars. How do you speak to them?
Basu: I wonder if reflecting on your childhood, your parents' work, and the journalism that you did in your early career through the 2016 election, how has all of that as an exercise made you think about approaching the midterms and the next election and really just the future of your work?
Katy Tur: I think we are most effective, when our tone is measured and when we are delivering just the facts. And that's not to say that we are giving both quote-unquote sides equal weight. But we bend toward the truth. And we are on the side of the truth. When we're going for the midterms, we say, this is a candidate who believes in this, this is a policy that this candidate has voted for. This is a policy this candidate has not voted for. Here's what people in this state believe. Here is what people in this state say that they want. There's a giant part of this population that doesn't watch cable or broadcast news, doesn't read the paper. [LAUGHS] You know? There are 80 million people who don't vote and more than that who don't watch cable TV. And we've done research on it. They are people who say that they want less partisan coverage. They want analysis, but not biased analysis. They want the context surrounding a story, but they want it told to them straight. And that's the kind of journalism that I wanna do. That's the kind of journalist that I wanna be. I don't wanna be preaching to a choir. I want to be informing the public.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu: Katy, thank you so much for your time.
Katy Tur: Shumita, thank you.
Basu, Narrating: You can find Katy Tur's memoir, called "Rough Draft," on Apple Books. We have a link for you on our show notes page.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]