After we launched our new series last week featuring the most unhinged fan mail sent to women TV reporters, many of you reached out with your own WTF stories. Some funny, some genuinely traumatic, and some in a category of deranged all their own, like this one:
Something I learned during my reporting: a lot of women only wear closed-toed shoes while on-air because of creepers like these. Apparently it's a thing to screenshot and collect pictures of women's feet. The More You Know™ — or wish you didn't.
Besides the women who shared their wildest fan mail with us, we spoke with another on-air legend, Audie Cornish, about something she hid for years on the job — her pop culture obsessions. Her new CNN podcast 'Engagement Party,' with former 'All Things Considered' colleague Ari Shapiro, is built on an argument she couldn't have pitched a decade ago: that your Bravo watchlist is more politically charged than you’d think. She spoke with us about the pressure of being taken seriously as a journalist and why we shouldn’t be panicking just yet about AI and Substacks taking traditional journalism jobs.
Plus, in Seen and Heard: how Politico's union just forced the newsroom to pull its AI tools, and a pro-Jeff Bezos reader hot take in I Said What I Said.
xoxo,
Stephanie
Our Tuesday newsletter is for paid members. Thursday issues are free. Did a friend forward this to you? Subscribe to get La Fronde in your inbox.
Audie Cornish enters her new era
By Samantha Bergeson
For years, Audie Cornish felt like she had to hide parts of herself as a journalist.
The former NPR host and current CNN anchor spent most of her career inside institutions that prioritized hard news and objectivity rather than cultural commentary. The latter was often dismissed as fluff entertainment journalism. But with CNN's new podcast series 'Engagement Party,' Audie is done hiding her multifaceted approach to reporting. The show reunites her with 'All Things Considered' colleague Ari Shapiro for an unprecedented take on news: contextualizing politics within pop culture, and challenging what a "serious journalist" is even supposed to sound like in the modern media landscape.
"To me, there is just as much politics out of 'Euphoria' [as there is] out of the Kentucky primaries," she says. "We're living in an era where the cult of personality and the cult of politics are one and the same."
Audie spoke with La Fronde about what the Trump administration's defunding of public media means for journalism, why she's "unsubscribed from hot takes," and why the lines between political and entertainment reporting have never been more blurred—look no further than the misogynoir of ‘Summer House’ as an example.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.