Broadcasting the news
BY MIKE UNGER
The thrilling, frenetic pace of a television newsroom can be infectious, and soon after Susan Zirinsky arrived at American University in the early 1970s, she caught the bug.
A high-energy film and television enthusiast during her childhood in suburban New York City, Zirinsky, SOC/BA ’74, landed a part-time weekend job at CBS News while studying journalism at AU.
“I couldn’t believe how it put together in the best sense of the word the creative film aspect I love with a feeling of importance,” Zirinsky says. “It was so exciting and interesting. I called my dad and told him that I wanted to work in television news.”
Over the course of the next three decades, Zirinsky rose through the ranks to the top of her profession, often coming face to face with history—and tragedy—in places like Panama and Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. As the lead producer at every U.S.-Soviet summit during the Carter and Reagan administrations, senior producer of the network’s news operation in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, and the head of CBS News’ coverage of both the 1992 presidential election and Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, Zirinsky’s finger has always been in the fire.
“I’ve never taken anything for granted,” she says. “Early on when I was a researcher for the bureau, there was a document that someone was willing to give a CBS reporter and I had to go to the White House to get it. I hopped on the back of a motorcycle courier, and as I ran through the White House gate I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m running up the driveway of the White House!’ I never felt like it became old hat. Years later when I was the White House producer we would travel with the president. Every time I got in a helicopter, it’d be early evening and the sun was setting over Washington, I would think I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”
If you think Zirinsky’s life sounds almost cinematically adventurous, well, so did Hollywood producer James Brooks. He signed Zirinsky to be a technical advisor and associate producer of his 1987 film Broadcast News, and he wrote the lead character, played by Holly Hunter, loosely based on her. Leaving no detail unturned, Zirinsky wrote the scripts for the movie’s news reports, delivered by actors Jack Nicholson, William Hurt, and Albert Brooks.
While Zirinsky’s achievements have been remarkable by any measure, she does not have time to dwell on them. She’s expanded her professional horizons by producing an entertainment special on Elvis Presley, a Britney Spears reality series, and a critically acclaimed documentary about 9/11, and since 1996 she’s been executive producer of the CBS News magazine 48 Hours, the third-longest running show on network prime time television.
“I’m responsible for deciding what stories we go after and working with the producers as to how we execute those stories,” she says. “Prime time is so difficult, it’s like going to war every week.”
Zirinsky now lives back home in New York, with her husband, Joe Peyronnin, vice president of news at the Telemundo network, and their nine-year-old daughter, Zoe. All in all it’s been quite a ride for the woman who said she became “obsessed” with TV news while at AU.
“AU always had real people as teachers talking about the real world,” she says. “It wasn’t some philosophy of what could be, the curriculum was more about here are the tools you’ll need, it’s up to you to do it.
“I’ve been exposed to all these cataclysmic moments, and I feel very grateful to have been an observer of history.”
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