From KTVK to hosting ‘Most Wanted’
Elizabeth Vargas, the host of the rebooted “America’s Most Wanted,” learned early on about the competitive nature of television news.
Vargas, who has anchored “World News Tonight” on ABC News and hosted “20/20,” among many other high-profile jobs, worked at Channel 3 (KTVK) in Phoenix from 1986-89. Phil Alvidrez, then the station’s news director, hired her.
Vargas still considers Alvidrez and Dennis O’Neill, who was the assistant news director, mentors.
“Phil used to have resume tapes stacked from the floor to the ceiling of his office,” Vargas told The Arizona Republic from Los Angeles. “And every time you walked into his office it was a very visible and powerful reminder of how many other people wanted your job.”
Alvidrez laughed at the memory. “It’s funny in hindsight, the things that you don’t think about at the time,” he said. “It’s true. We were always just looking at people — not as a threat to the people we had, but just to see who was out there. I never even considered the impact it might have on someone walking in. That was unintended.
“But good.”
Besides, he didn’t need to light a fire under Vargas anyway.
Vargas ‘was motivated internally’
“In terms of trying to motivate Elizabeth, I didn’t need to have a stack of resume tapes stacked in my office,” Alvidrez said. “She was motivated internally. … She was one of the best reporters, just instinctually, that we got a chance to work with.”
Like most young TV reporters, Vargas looked for a job in a bigger market. And she found one.
“My three years (in Phoenix) I learned a lot,” she said. “They taught me a lot. They’re amazing people. I went on from Phoenix to work in Chicago, which was one of the more difficult and unpleasant chapters of my professional career. I went from one extreme to the other — really nice people who want to teach and mentor and give you opportunities, to working in a snake pit.”
She rebounded, you might say. Before she went to ABC News and worked in some of the highest-profile jobs you can have there (or anywhere in network news). Vargas worked for NBC News as a “Dateline” correspondent.
Vargas and Bob Woodruff, who had also worked in Phoenix, succeeded the late Peter Jennings as co-anchors of “World News Tonight” in 2005. But in 2006, Woodruff was seriously wounded while reporting in Iraq. In 2006 Vargas stepped down to take maternity leave. When she returned, it was as the co-anchor of “20/20,” a job she held for 15 years.
“My happiest stint there was definitely hosting ’20/20.’ … That was definitely the happiest chapter,” she said. “The other ones were a little more challenging, let’s just put it that way.”
How her past work has prepared her to host ‘America’s Most Wanted’
All of it was excellent preparation for hosting “America’s Most Wanted,” which returned to Fox on March 15. It originally ran on the network from 1988 to 2011, with a brief stint on Lifetime in 2012.
“I spent many, many years hosting ’20/20,’ and I would say 80% of the hour or two-hour episodes we did were based and rooted in true crime-solving mysteries, who did it?” Vargas said. “How did it happen? How did they find the guy? What’s the evidence? How does the DNA work? People love that. Maybe people also love to be amateur sleuths.”
They love something, because there seems to be no end to Americans’ fascination with true crime.
“There is a bottomless appetite to it,” Vargas said. “I think there’s a psychological component, for the same reason people slow down when they pass an accident on the highway and want to look. There’s a sort of there-but-forthe-grace-of-God-go-I element. And I think that it’s just exploded and grown. … There are entire basic cable networks devoted to it now. I can’t even believe it.”
Believe it. “America’s Most Wanted,” all those years ago, helped kick off the craze, after all. But Vargas sees it as different.
“The one thing about this show, and the reason I agreed to do this show, was
not only because I spent years and year and years doing the true-crime element of this,” Vargas said. “The hardest part of doing those stories was always — always — interviewing the victims or the victims’ family members, who are in fact victims themselves. It was so heartbreaking and so gut-wrenching and often so difficult for me to make it through that interview without myself having to call a break because I needed to go cry in a corner, as well.
“And all of those interviews ended with me giving hugs to these people and trying to give them whatever comfort I could give, when what they really wanted was justice, and resolution for this horrible chapter in their lives.”
‘The only show out there that gives victims of crime justice and resolution’
That, she says, is what sets “America’s Most Wanted” apart.
“This show is the only show out there that gives victims of crime justice and resolution,” Vargas said. “Because if our viewers can help find these people who have been on the run, that’s what they will give these victims, is resolution and justice.”
It’s a different storytelling format than what she’s used to. On TV newsmagazines, she might have explored a single case for an hour or two — “quite a cinematic sort of luxurious amount of time,” she said. On “America’s Most
Wanted,” a segment might last eight or 10 minutes. But Vargas still has one requirement for each story.
“Every single show, I’ve insisted that it’s so important to have the victims of the crime on the show and represented,” she said, “because I want to keep them front and foremost in viewers’ minds.”
Vargas also hosts “Heart of the Matter with Elizabeth Vargas,” a podcast in which she talks to people about their struggles with addiction and recovery. Vargas has been open about her alcoholism and recovery, including in her book, “Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction.”
Why Vargas started her podcast, ‘Heart of the Matter’
“The reason I started the podcast was because right now in this country, even before the mental health crisis that the pandemic brought on, 18% of people who need help get it in the world of addiction,” she said. “And that’s largely because of stigma. We know that a third of Americans believe that addiction is a moral failing. That’s a problem, and we have to turn that around. That’s what I’m hoping to do with the podcast.”
She said she finds podcasting the perfect format for these discussions.
“The podcast I’m doing, there isn’t anything like that,” she said. “Outside of an AA meeting, you’re not going to hear anybody’s true story of what it was like and what it’s like now. My podcast is different in that respect, and we couldn’t have done that in a TV show. … It’s more intimate.”
Whether it’s the podcast or the show, Vargas is using the skills she learned a long time ago.
“My entire career has always been about telling a story,” she said. “Asking the right questions to get enough information, and also to help the viewers feel as powerfully as possible the pain of the victims, the frustration of the FBI agents or U.S. Marshals who have been hunting for years and years and years and get so close and then lose them again. Absolutely, those skills I started learning at KTVK with Phil Alvidrez and Dennis O’Neill I have been honing since I was 22 in their newsroom, and (I’m) still using today.”