Adrienne Bankert talks about her career and her book
Adrienne Bankert is an Emmy Award winning Street” Journalist and Co-Host of NewsNation’s Morning in America. Photos provided by NewsNation.
Bankert knew at age 12 she would do television. She was watching Oprah Winfrey and knew she could be on television. She even told her mother that she would be on television. She just didn’t know how she would do it. There were a lot of people who invested in her and gave her a shot. She describes those people as angels along her journey.
Bankert graduated from the University of Southern California. It was a Junior College counselor who drove her to University of Southern California and showed her around. She knew she had to start news if she wanted to get really good.
“I knew news would make me work a lot. Anything you practice, anything you do over and over again, you become better at,” she said.
With the way broadcast journalism works, Bankert didn’t apply for jobs, people would reach out to her about working for a network. She has been the co-host of Morning In America since 2021.
The biggest surprise of Bankert’s life was to come to Chicago and have it immediately feel like home.
When it comes to being fair and balanced in news, Bankert remembered seeing a post that said, “be a thermostat, not a thermometer.” She said journalist should set the tone and the atmosphere for news.
“The way that I cover the news is to come from a place of fearlessness,” she said, adding that she reports the news as if she is a viewer and from a place of curiosity, being as authentic and inquisitive as possible.
Bankert wrote the book, “Your Hidden Superpower: The Kindness That Makes You Unbeatable at Work and Connects You With Anyone.” She was advised to write the book by her mentor, who wrote the foreword of the book, because of her interesting perspective on kindness. She wrote the book in eight months. “Your Hidden Superpower” is filled with stories of people being kind to Bankert.
Bankert hopes that people read the book and read it more than once, just to remind themselves to be kind. She believes that kindness is not elementary, people need constant muscle memory as how to treat people and how to be treated.
With everyone Bankert has interviewed, she has treated them like they have a stroke of brilliance. She has interviewed a lot of people who had made a lot of lasting impressions. But one person she mentioned is Brad Pitt, because of a conversation they had about mortality and the brevity of time. It stuck with her because she learned something about him that she didn’t know and she learned something that she could apply to her own life: “If it doesn’t matter in 100 years, it doesn’t matter,” she said.
Bankert has been able to bring parts of herself to Morning in America. She worked previously with her boss at NewsNation when she worked at Good Morning America. It means there is familiarity about how she conducts storytelling and knows her work. She employs all of who she is when she reports the news.
“You take the whole of who you are and you bring it to the job every single day, and, you’re OK with that. Rather than thinking, I have to compartmentalize myself into this little box, because I’m neutral. But, that’s not how we act,” she said. “I’m not afraid to bring all of me to work, I just have to know when to pull what tools out of the toolkit.”
Her advice to aspiring journalists is to get a mentor who will invest in them and believes in them.
Morning in America airs on NewsNation starting at 5am (CST). Learn how to watch at www.joinNN.com.
“You Hidden Superpower” is available where books are sold. To find out more about Adrienne Bankert, visit adriennebankert.com. or follow ABONTV on Instagram.
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