A newshound from the get-go
Starting with youthful newspaper reading, Ed O’keefe’s interest in events led him to TV news
CBS national political reporter and Delmar native Ed O’keefe credits the Times Union for getting him into a journalism career. “I picked the paper up first off the porch, brought it in and read it while eating breakfast. My dad would come down later and ask what was going on, and I’d tell him.”
By middle school O’keefe could name pretty much every leader in the global economic group Group of Seven. “I never realized that was a unique skill till 7th grade when my teacher Mr. Boyer placed pictures of 30 people in the news around his classroom, and I could identify 27 of them. No one else came close. He wanted to know how I knew them, and I said, ‘I read the newspaper every morning.’”
Today O’keefe, who graduated from Bethlehem High School in 2001, is all over the news reporting on the 2020 presidential election. He regularly appears on the CBS Evening News, CBS This Morning, Face the Nation, and Washington Week on PBS.
“I knew for a long time I wanted to work in Washington one day, and when I left Delmar and enrolled in American University I basically majored in all things Washington.”
He actually majored in a multi-disciplinary degree called Commu
nications-economics-law and Government. “I spent my four years at American trying to decide do I want to be the person who is in government, the public servant that makes history, or do I want to be the guy who gets to witness history and tell everyone about it and then go home at the end of the day and have some semblance of a normal life.”
Over the course of a few internships he determined he would much rather be the guy who is the witness of history. “So now every day I tell people what is going on just like when I was that young kid telling my parents all the news I had read in the Times Union.”
He is a big believer in encouraging young people to seek out internships. “I had some exciting internships such as the one I had junior year in college, where
I was paid to go to congressional hearings and write up summaries for an organization that would send what I had written to lobbyists and special-interest clients of theirs.”
Between classes he would rush to Congress and listen, such as the day he heard Gen. David Petraeus explain to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee why more troops were needed in Iraq. “My job was to report on what was the most significant thing said at the hearing, and that internship required me to listen and figure that out. It also gave me a front row seat to who were the people in Washington who had the real power. I remember seeing Senators (Joe) Biden and (Barack) Obama ask questions and interact with each other on that committee. It was all very exciting for a 22-year-old kid.”
“I knew for a long time I wanted to work in Washington one day, and when I left Delmar and enrolled in American University I basically majored in all things Washington.” — Ed O’keefe
Another internship he had, while spending his junior spring semester studying in London, allowed him to attend the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. “That organization credentialed me to get in to the conventions that year. I didn’t actually do any reporting, but it was a ticket in the door. I was there the night Obama blew the roof off giving the keynote address.”
With all this valuable experience he landed a job immediately after college with The Washington
Post. “I started out at the the Post working for their digital paper. I covered the 2008 campaign as a 25 year-old. I didn’t write about it for the paper. I blogged about it. I also hosted a daily political podcast. I carried a video camera with me and followed along with our print reporters David Broder and Dan Balz. My job was to bring their work to the internet.”
O’keefe shot and edited a video dispatch from the campaign trail. He would take pictures, do interviews with the paper’s reporters, stitch it all together and, at 6 a.m. the next day, it would be uploaded on the Post’s website. “It’s ironic that while I was working for a newspaper I was learning how to be a broadcaster, and I was also learning how to write for both mediums. I tell people that I received a bachelor’s degree from American University but in many ways my master’s degree from The Washington Post.”
After 13 years at The Washington Post he began to realize what he really loved was doing stories visually rather than as a writer. He started to be a guest on TV news shows on MSNBC where he learned how to give quick political insights. “The Post also owns some local TV stations around the country and I’d be invited there to such places as Florida, Houston and Detroit. I learned how to keep my opinions brief. It reminded me of what I did every morning at the kitchen table in Delmar, to look over the news and give a quick summary.”
O’keefe realizes these are very historic days to be a reporter with a recent presidential impeachment, a worldwide pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and a November presidential election. “It’s exciting to cover this, incredibly humbling, and it’s my dream come true. When I was a kid growing up the only TV station that came in clearly was Channel 6, and throughout the 1990s we watched Ernie Tetrault give the local news and Dan Rather the national news, and now most nights you can find me there.”
He said with the pandemic the number of reporters allowed into the rooms where the big events are happening is very small. “There might be 12 reporters covering these big stories, such as the day Joe Biden named Kamala Harris to be his vicepresidential candidate, and as a reporter for CBS I’m usually one of them. I always stop and remind myself how fortunate I am to have this job, but I also have a great responsibility to do it well because there is a long line of people behind me who would like this position.”
As a parent with two young children, O’keefe hopes to instill in his daughters what his own parents did for him. “I grew up in a family where if you wanted to do something it was when and not if. My parents understood I had a dream and they said, ‘OK, then it will happen, and we will help you as much as we can to make it happen.’”
Jack Rightmyer, an adjunct English professor at Siena College, is a regular contributor to the Times Union.