Katy Tur Is Tougher Than She Looks

The NBC correspondent’s swift and surprising rise
at the network mirrored that of the presidential
candidate she covered and occasionally battled with.

 .. “Look back there! ‘Little Katy,’ she’s back there,’” Ms. Tur remembered Donald J. Trump yelling at her at one of his rallies, as hundreds of heads turned in her direction. “She’s such a liar, what a little liar she is!”
.. And I’m a big believer in reporting from the outside. I’ve always been an outsider. I think being in the White House press corps, it’s difficult to do the sort of journalism that I would want to do.”
.. “Katy is old-school in the best ways,” her boss, Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, said. “She’s tough, edgy, and operates with one guiding mission: Chase the facts. And you can’t rattle her. No matter what’s thrown at her, she stays focused, digs in and gets answers.”
.. Norah O’Donnell, an anchor of “CBS This Morning” and a contributor to “60 Minutes,” told me: “The hardest thing to do is to report the truth in the face of taunting, and Katy did that. The sky’s the limit for her.”
.. She stumbles over names and words, but I don’t see that as a liability. It makes her human, and she brings also a sense of earnestness and candor.”
.. Her cutting wit, which she underscores with a sharply raised eyebrow, comes through occasionally.
.. Katharine Bear Tur was born Oct. 26, 1983, in Los Angeles County. Her parents, Bob Tur, a pilot and reporter, and her mother, Marika Gerrard, a photographer, founded the Los Angeles News Service to cover police raids, fires, plane crashes and chaos there. From their helicopter, they scored some of the first TV images of O. J. Simpson’s Bronco chase in 1994 and the beating of Reginald Denny, a truck driver,
.. Ms. Tur showed a knack for reporting early on. A family video taken when she was 4 years old shows her looking much as she does today, long blondish hair, aquiline nose, wide mouth, sidling up to her 2-year-old brother, Jamie, with a microphone in hand, asking him questions.
.. She planned to study medicine when she enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but switched to philosophy and art. She found she was not all that serious about art, but debates over free will can get her blood pumping to this day.