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Elizabeth Vargas, broadcast journalist

When she became a permanent co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, in January 2006, Elizabeth Vargas also became the first Hispanic individual and only the third woman to anchor a nationally broadcast nightly news program. A 20-year veteran of television broadcasting, Vargas “exudes a smart, thoughtful and authoritative air the kind of reassuring steadiness viewers crave in an increasingly chaotic world,” as Liz Llorente wrote for Hispanic (June 2004, on-line). Over the last decade she has made a name for herself as a correspondent on news magazines such as Dateline and 20/20, conducting interviews in a “penetrating and persistent, but always polite” manner, in Llorente's words. Still, Vargas, who began her career as a news anchor, never truly abandoned the role, having served in that capacity for the news segment of NBC's Today Show as well as for ABC's World News Tonight Saturday and World News Tonight Sunday, even as she pursued other opportunities.

The first of three children, Elizabeth Vargas was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on September 6, 1962 to Ralf Vargas, a Puerto Rican career army officer who retired with the rank of colonel, and his wife, Anne, an Irish-American. She spent much of her childhood overseas on army bases, first in Japan, when she was a toddler, and in Germany and Belgium during her adolescence. As a high-school student, she became interested in pursuing a career as a journalist but never expected to go into television. “I grew up without TV,” she told Michael A. Lipton and Anne Longley for People (September 9, 1996). “My strength was writing”indeed, she was editor in chief of her high-school newspaper. Her aspirations changed while she was attending the prestigious journalism program at the University of Missouri, in Columbia: she managed to secure a position as reporter-anchor on KOMU-TV, an NBC affiliate connected with the university. “We were No. 1 in the ratings, and I was being paid $3.35 an hour!” she told Lipton and Longley. “I had to waitress to make ends meet. [Customers] would say, ‘Aren’t you that newscaster?’ and I'd say, ‘Yes, I am, would you like rice pilaf or a baked potato with your entree?’”

After completing her degree, in 1984, Vargas moved to Reno, Nevada, to become a reporter-anchor with the CBS affiliate KTVN-TV. In 1986 she won the lead-reporter spot at the ABC affiliate KTVK-TV in Phoenix, Arizona. While she was working in Phoenix, Ken Lindner, a television agent who represents such on-air personalities as Matt Lauer of NBC, discovered her. “I was visiting a client in Phoenix and saw Elizabeth hanging from a helicopter doing a live shot,” Lindner told Arissa S. Wang for Electronic Media (January 15, 2001). “I never saw anybody with more ownership of her material, or more compelling.” In 1989, with the help of Lindner, Vargas landed a position in Chicago, a major news market, as a reporter and weekend-news co-anchor with the CBS affiliate WBBM-TV. In 1992 a shakeup at the station led to the removal of Vargas’s co-anchor, Mike Parker, from the broadcast. Shortly thereafter, the station announced that Vargas would also be removed from her anchoring position after her contract ran out and “be used strictly in a ‘prominent reporting role,’” as Robert Feder reported for the Chicago Sun-Times (July 27, 1992).

Again with Lindner's help, Vargas began looking for better opportunities. In 1993 she took a position with NBC in New York, working as a correspondent on Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric, a TV news magazine, and as one of the anchors on the news segment of the Today Show. The following year Now was absorbed by NBC’s Dateline, and Vargas became a regular presence on that program. She also continued working on Today, and in 1995 her role on the show was expanded to include substituting for Katie Couric as needed. The variety of her roles at NBC demonstrated her versatility, a quality that was in evidence on Dateline, for which she covered stories on breast-cancer research, a notorious drunk-driving case in New Mexico, and the mysterious life and death of the North Carolina tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Vargas thus caught the attention of television executives at other stations, and in 1996, the year her contract with NBC was set to expire, other networks began expressing interest in her. Vargas, meanwhile, was still vying for a more prominent position at NBC, seeking assurances that she would succeed the popular Couric as co-anchor of the Today Show. While the network's executives could not promise her that job, since Couric was expected to remain in her position, they reportedly offered her the anchor spot on Today’s weekend edition and a continuing role as a correspondent on Dateline. Vargas was apparently not satisfied with the offer, and NBC broke off its contract negotiations with her, giving her the freedom to pursue offers from ABC and CBS.

In June 1996 Vargas debuted in the anchor position for the news segment of ABC's Good Morning America. By the end of the month, she was already taking on the role of a substitute co-host, sharing duties with Joan Lunden when Charles Gibson took a week off. The ABC News chief, Roone Arledge, publicly revealed that Vargas was Lunden's likely heir. Vargas herself reportedly began telling her new colleagues that she had been hired to replace Lunden, which created problems for her on the show. (Vargas and Lunden denied rumors that they were feuding.) In the fall of 1996, Vargas began taking on other roles at ABC, debuting as a correspondent on Turning Point with a story on gay marriage. The following year she moved from her position on Good Morning America and became a correspondent on ABC’s prime-time news magazines, 20/20 and PrimeTime Live. She also became an anchor on ABC’s World News Tonight Saturday and was given the opportunity to develop one-hour news specials. The first, Diana: Legacy of a Princess (1997), aired on September 6, 1997, the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. Other specials included Miracles (1998), which investigated how the Catholic Church verifies miracles and determines whether a person will be granted sainthood, and Secrets of the World of Fashion and Beauty (1998), which dealt in part with the issue of drug use among models. In the summer of 1998, Vargas served as the host of ABC’s weekly series News Summer Thursday, which aired reports on consumer and self-help issues.

Rumors that Vargas would land the co-anchor job on a struggling Good Morning America became widespread in early 1999, and later in the year, when her contract with ABC was set to expire, there was also talk that she might co-anchor CBS This Morning. Vargas, however, signed a three-year deal with ABC. She continued anchoring World News Tonight Saturday, began hosting a six-part series called Vanished about people who had disappeared, and became one of the hosts of 20/20 Downtown, a refashioned version of 20/20’s Thursday edition that broadcast each week from different out-of-studio sites rather than the anchor’s desk. That show featured hosts younger than those on the other editions of 20/20, as part of a move by ABC executives to attract younger viewers. Vargas also continued serving as a correspondent on other editions of 20/20. For the Wednesday edition, for example, she interviewed Cary Stayner, a man accused and later convicted of killing four women in Yosemite National Park. 20/20 Downtown was taken off the air at the beginning of 2000, and Vargas turned her attention to making six new installments of the series Vanished, continued anchoring the weekend news, and substituted for Peter Jennings, then the host of World News Tonight, as needed during the week.

In 2002 Downtown was revived and was scheduled this time to air on Wednesdays. Vargas returned to her position on the program, while continuing to carry out her other duties with ABC. The following year she hosted a much-discussed special edition of PrimeTime that focused on Laci Peterson, a woman who had gone missing and was later found to have been murdered by her husband, Scott Peterson. That edition of PrimeTime openly questioned the integrity of the media, which had lavished attention on Laci Peterson while ignoring the cases of many other women who had been murdered or were missing, particularly minority women, some of whose circumstances were similar to Laci Peterson's. Vargas also hosted a news special called Jesus, Mary, and DaVinci. Inspired by the idea at the center of Dan Brown's best-selling novel The DaVinci Code (2003), the special considered the possibility that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and gave birth to his child. “For me, it’s made religion more real and, ironically, much more interesting,” Vargas told the Associated Press (October 30, 2003), “which is what we’re hoping to do for our viewers.” (Vargas's parents, who raised her in the Roman Catholic faith, said to her, “Oh, my goodness, what are you doing?” when they found out about the special, according to the Associated Press.)

In November 2003 Vargas’s profile at ABC rose. In addition to working on news magazines and substituting occasionally for Jennings on World News Tonight, she was given the anchor position on World News Tonight Sunday, a prestigious job at the network. A year later she took over for Barbara Walters as a co-anchor of 20/20. “I love doing all kinds of stories . . . I love breaking news and features and I don't mind doing the occasional celebrity profile,” Vargas told Michael Starr for the New York Post (May 19, 2004). “We really have the entire world as options for stories [on 20/20].” She said about Barbara Walters, “She's been a wonderful mentor and role model and has been exceedingly generous in a business that's not always that way.” In her new post Vargas wasted little time in attempting to reinvigorate the show, airing, for example, a much-praised and risky installment arguing that the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, which had been portrayed in the press as an anti-gay hate crime, was motivated by a drug-induced rage rather than homophobia. “None of this, as Ms. Vargas points out, changes the horror of the murder. . . . But getting the truthin ABC's revisionist investigation, which seeks to overturn the powerful and canonical version of the facts and meaning of this crimeis worthwhile, as it thickens the description and adds to the mystery of what happened that night in Laramie,” Virginia Heffernan wrote for the New York Times (November 26, 2004). Heffernan predicted that Vargas’s work could help revive magazine shows, which had been declining in popularity.

In April 2005 Peter Jennings announced that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and shortly afterward he resigned his anchor's post on World News Tonight. (He died in August.) Vargas, along with Charles Gibson, began substituting for Jennings, while ABC looked for a long-term replacement. In December the network announced that Vargas and Bob Woodruff would share permanent anchor duty on World News Tonight. Vargas viewed that decision as a significant one for herself and others, saying, as the Washington Post (December 6, 2005) reported, “I'm a woman, I'm a working mother, I'm a minority. Being a mom is the biggest, most important role in my entire life. . . . Especially as a woman, I really, really want to do this well. It's important to have a woman be successful in this role.” With two anchors, ABC was differentiating its world-news broadcast from those on the other major networks, which featured sole anchors. World News Tonight would introduce other differences as well, broadcasting live in three time zones, rather than broadcasting a live show in the East and re-airing it in other time zones, as is generally done; having the anchors broadcast daily Web-casts as well as contribute to a blog called the World Newser; and allowing each anchor to report regularly from locations, national and international, where news stories were developing. Vargas and Woodruff officially took their places on World News Tonight on January 3, 2006. Assessing their performances, Alessandra Stanley wrote for the New York Times (January 9, 2006), “Both Mr. Woodruff and Ms. Vargas are fine in the job: good-looking, highly polished and competent.”

Before January came to a close, just as everyone involved in the show was getting comfortable with its new arrangement, ABC’s dual-anchor format was placed in jeopardy. On January 29, while Woodruff and Doug Vogt, an ABC cameraman, were pursuing a story in Iraq, they were seriously injured by a roadside bomb that exploded near the vehicle in which they were traveling. ABC briefly considered making Vargas the program's sole anchor, but David Westin, the president of ABC News, was convinced that two anchors illustrated that “leading World News on camera had become too big for just one person,” as Jacque Steinberg and Bill Carter wrote for the New York Times (February 1, 2006). Instead, Westin chose to have Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson, the co-hosts of Good Morning America, work on an alternating basis with Vargas. Vargas, whom Westin praised for doing “a terrific job at being very solid and stable throughout this,” as Matea Gold reported for the Los Angeles Times (February 6, 2006), expressed her determination to move forward in Woodruff’s absence, preparing the way for his return. “We had all sorts of great plans,” she remarked, according to Gold. “We’re trying to figure out now how to persevere and to continue to put on the very best show we can, not only because we all want to, [but] because we all know that’s what Bob would want. Selfishly, I want Bob to return to a strong show that we can all be proud of and that is competitive.” As of early March 2006, Woodruff remained at the National Naval Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland.

Vargas won an Associated Press Award for Outstanding Journalism and an Emmy Award in 2000 for her story on the six-year-old Cuban refugee Elian Gonzales. She is married to Marc Cohn, a songwriter best known for writing “Walking in Memphis.” The couple have a three-year-old son, Zachary Rafael, and are expecting the birth of another child during the summer. Cohn also has two children from a previous marriage. Vargas has said that the birth of her son changed the way she approaches her professional and private lives. “I don't know any parent who hasn't gone through a cataclysmic change,” she told Llorente. “Having children changes your life irrevocably. It takes the whole paradigm and turns it upside down in the most wonderful way. Until you have a child, you've never been certain you'd give your life for someone, you've never been so proud, you've never felt so tired.”