CNN’s Dana Bash reveals she was almost fired on her first day

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To mark our premiere newsletter, we talked to Chief Political Correspondent and "State of the Union" co-host Dana Bash about how her first day on the job at CNN went. Let's just say there was only one way to go from there …

🌟 Dana Bash reveals she was almost fired on her first day

Dana Bash's first day at CNN in 1993 didn't go so well.

She had just been hired as a freelance production assistant in the understaffed DC bureau. There wasn't much time for training and, at the last minute, the 22-year-old realized she was responsible for operating the teleprompter for the 3 p.m. show -– a job she had never done before and had never been taught to do.

"I was completely lost," she recalled.

After the show, the news anchor – who "completely flubbed" on live TV because his scripts were out of order -- confronted her.

"Who are you?" he fumed.

"I'm Dana," she replied. "It's my first day."

"Oh, yeah? Well, it's going to be your last!" he retorted.

"It was like (a scene out of) a movie," Bash recalled. "I thought I was gonna throw up right then and there."

She can laugh about it now and, while she won't name the former anchor, who "swears it didn't happen," she says he is now a good friend and one of her mentors.

Today, Bash is CNN's chief political correspondent and the co-host of its premier Sunday political interview show, "State of the Union."

The news business has changed in so many ways since she started at the network in 1993, she said. CNN had launched in 1980.

"It was Ted Turner's CNN. … It was still very much a startup," Bash said. "It had the feel of a place where you were fighting as an underdog.

"We were very unique. There were no other cable news outlets – Fox didn't exist yet, MSNBC didn't exist yet – and at the time, Ted Turner's motto 'The news is the star' was very, very much front and center."

While news is still the star today, the way news is reported has had to evolve, she explained.

"It used to be that when we started in news, (we would report) 'This side says this, this side says that, you decide,' " she said. "(Today) it's not just about different philosophies or different ideologies that people bring to Washington (on) how they govern, it's flat-out falsehoods -- that have become quite dangerous -- and the facts.

"I just don't see, in this environment, that changing anytime soon."

She says the political news business is still male-dominated, but today there are more female reporters on Capitol Hill and they have formed a "sisterhood" that didn't exist when she started.

"It is still a man's world, and it's not as overt as it used to be but there are subtle examples of it on a daily basis," she said. "The one benefit that I have now that female reporters didn't have at CNN or elsewhere in Washington was quantity. There are more of us. And there really is a sisterhood among the female reporters, especially in the DC bureau but even CNN more broadly – where there's a lot of 'attagirl' and 'Can I get your advice on this?' "

Bash has interviewed countless politicians, presidents and other newsmakers – she's even got a new podcast, "Total Recall," about the 2003 California recall of Gov. Gray Davis.

But she said there is one interview that she'll never forget.

"One of the most memorable interviews I ever did was in 2018, interviewing John Lewis while walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge," she recalled. "It was a spiritual experience, which is not something that I normally say … just to have that conversation with him in general, but physically in the place where he was almost beaten to death."

Lewis, a longtime US congressman from Georgia, survived a brutal beating by police during a 1965 civil rights march on that bridge in Selma, Alabama. Bash's intervie w took place on the anniversary of that march, while Lewis was pushing to reinstate parts of the Voting Rights Act that had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013. Lewis died last year at age 80.

"He wasn't talking about (civil rights) from a historical perspective only," Bash noted. "It was a current fight … and so it was just a reminder that there's still a lot of work that needs to be done."

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When he was a boy, Paul Fronczak found a box of newspaper clippings hidden in his home that launched a lifelong search for answers about what happened in his early life. His journey and stranger-than-fiction life story are the focus of the CNN Films documentary, "The Lost Sons," which is scheduled to premiere Sunday, Sept. 26 at 9 p.m. ET. Here's an advance look.

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