As I chat with journalist and political correspondent Abby Phillip over Zoom, it’s a complicated time. Three weeks before the general election, the political climate is murky and filled with more and more inflammatory rhetoric. Phillip is knee-deep in all of it, as she just celebrated a year of being a primetime anchor on CNN with her rapidly growing series, NewsNight.
She has been delivering perspectives on some of the most important headlines since her program began, launching two days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, pushing through the primaries, and covering the race to the White House this year, and the major change in candidates, which has been wild to watch. “It’s been a wide range of things. And so that’s been fun and exciting, and I’m really proud of our ability to have that kind of range, honestly,” she shares.
Phillip has had to moderate heated discussions (weeks after our conversation, her show would go viral due to conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky’s ugly comment toward progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan). But she’s calm, cool and collected through it all, as the Harvard grad believes in the importance of hearing all perspectives.
“I fundamentally believe that we should hear other viewpoints,” she says. “There are differences of opinion among people who have the same political views. There are differences of opinion among people who have different political views. And I think it’s important to hear from those people. And if you don’t, then this is not the right show for you.”
“I think that sometimes being challenged on what you think is important, maybe it might strengthen your viewpoint. Maybe you might actually win the argument of ideas, or maybe you might lose the argument of ideas and hear something that you didn’t even think about,” she adds. “I don’t have to ‘stomach it.’ I welcome it. Ignorance is not bliss. You don’t benefit from just not knowing that other people have different points of view because those people are not only in this country, but they vote.”
Being used to the discourse doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a cakewalk for Phillip. She, like many voters in this country, gets weary about the state of things.
“Look, it’s exhausting. I’m not going to lie,” she says. “There are definitely some days when you go into the show and you’re like, why are we talking about this? Sometimes, the things that this political environment puts on the front burner are so divorced from what really matters to real people. And it’s particularly frustrating when it’s based on falsehoods and things that are not true. That’s exhausting.”
What makes her different from the rest of us though, is that Phillip doesn’t play about creating boundaries when it comes to the news she consumes. She’s not a fan of getting information on social media or from anywhere that’s not a reputable source.
“This is my job, so I have to engage with politics, but I also have developed a very strong filter for the types of information that I internalize,” she says. “I think that when you’re consuming a lot of information that is designed to evoke emotion in you, it is going to be emotionally draining. So sometimes that’s fine, but when you hit your wall, then you need to just seek out facts and just be really diligent about that.”
Phillip finds a respite and joy in taking in light, cute content on social media. “I’m here for your kids’ pictures. I’m here for the fall adventures. I’m here for the vacation pics,” she says. “I create guardrails. If I consumed it all, I would go crazy. I try to consume social media content that makes me smile as opposed to content that makes me angry or sad. And that’s how I create more balance in my life so that it doesn’t become so overwhelming. I really think that you can care deeply about what happens to this country while also protecting your sense of sanity.”
Exhaustion is par for the course though, especially going into election day. But seeing as Phillip has covered past elections as a political reporter, including 2020 and 2016, she knows that adrenaline and the ever-increasing vote tallies will keep her energized. But in regard to the day-to-day, as a sleep-deprived mother of a 3-year-old daughter, she, like all moms, is trying her best to get it all done. She heads to production in the evening when people are coming home from work and FaceTimes with her daughter during her bedtime, getting home for her own nightly ritual by 11:30 p.m.
“It’s a juggling act like it is for most parents. And for me, most days don’t look the same. But I will say that a lot of my days revolve around finding small chunks of time to spend with my daughter because the schedule that I have is not a normal parent schedule,” she says. “I feel like I work all day, and she’s in school all day, but I really go into the office when most people with regular schedules would be having dinner with their family. They’d be doing bedtime, they’d be catching up with kids after school. Those are the hours that I’m in the office.”
She admits to having mommy guilt at times. She says she misses more things than she’d like because she’s not able to be as present as she’d like to be Monday through Friday. Still, she aims to be kind to herself.
“My daughter’s starting to have a lot of emotions and she’s starting to be able to vocalize them. And so she tells me how she feels,” Phillip says. “I think it’s hard, honestly. I mean, there’s no way to sugarcoat it. There are days that my daughter pushes me away because she’s upset that I have not been around. Those are actually the hardest days because that sort of rejection is a reaction to her wanting you to be around more. And then there are mornings, like this morning when she was clinging to me, normally she’s really happy to go to school, but it was a three-day weekend, so we kind of spent a lot more time with each other. And this morning, she didn’t want to go to school, and drop-off was really, really hard. It’s hard for working moms because there’s no substitute for you as a mother.”
“I try to give myself some grace. I do the things that I have to do and I take my work very seriously and everything that comes with it. But there are also many times when I just say, sorry, I can’t go to that event. I can’t come to this thing. I can’t do that because time with your child is just the one thing that you cannot outsource,” she adds. “You cannot give that job to anybody else. There’s no substitute for you. And so sometimes you have to say no to other things in order to make sure that you’re putting money in that time piggy bank with your kid.”
She says it’s a constant give and take. Who can’t relate to that as a working mother?
“There are highs and lows to it, and some days you feel like you’re not doing a good job of bouncing it. And then other days it’s great,” she notes. “I hope, I pray that at the end of it all, maybe when she’s grown, and she’s out on her own, she looks back at this time and says, my mom was a great mom, and I’m really proud of her for the work that she did and all of that. And so that’s all we can hope for as parents.”
Giving herself grace also comes in the form of practicing self-care when she’s not live and direct on camera. Phillip works hard to maintain her peace, including by staying close to home, baking, sometimes with her daughter, making floral arrangements, and living a soft, private life.
“I’ve also been trying to really carve out time to physically take care of myself because the kind of stamina that you need in order to be a full-time working person, to be a parent, to have that energy, is a lot,” she says. “I’ve realized over time that when I work out or I do some kind of physical activity, it gives me more energy. So I’ve been trying to really invest in myself in that way.”
She also needs that energy to continue to cover the chaotic nature of government. But a year into doing so from the anchor desk, there’s no slowing Phillip down when it comes to keeping the public informed in a unique, engaging, very real way every night on cable news.
“I don’t think it’s helpful to have your head in the sand about what other people in this country believe and I think we should understand it. We should address it head on. And it might make you uncomfortable to hear it, but that’s American democracy,” she says. “We’re not going to only have one perspective on NewsNight. That’s not how we do things. And I’m unapologetic about that.”