Betty Ann Bowser, versatile correspondent for ‘PBS NewsHour,’ dies at 73

Betty Ann Bowser, a broadcast journalist who for decades was a regular presence on the “PBS NewsHour,” where she skillfully interwove policy analysis and empathetic interviews, died March 16 at a clinic near her home in Ajijic, Mexico. She was 73.

She had pneumonia, said her son Patrick Kelley, and had recently moved to Mexico because of the low cost of living.

Bowser, who began contributing to “NewsHour” in 1988 and served as its health correspondent before retiring in 2013, was known for both her doggedness as a reporter and her dry off-camera wit. Her coverage spanned the Oklahoma City bombing, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the fierce debate over healthcare restructuring under President Barack Obama.

“Betty Ann was as solid and reliable a reporter as there is, taking on assignments no matter how tough,” anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff said in an online “NewsHour” tribute. “You could drop her in the middle of any story, and she’d figure it out quickly.”

Bowser began her television career in 1966, working at a local station in Virginia. She soon rose to become co-anchor at what was then WTAR, the region’s CBS affiliate, where she was one of only two women in the newsroom.

“She said a lot of people wrote her off as some dumb girl who didn’t know what she was talking about,” Kelley recalled in a phone interview. “But my mom was steadfast on the principle that you always do your homework. When people try to discredit you or treat you like you don’t understand what you’re talking about, you have the intellect to back it up.”

Her breakthrough came after she joined CBS News in 1974. She was in California shortly after President Richard M. Nixon resigned from the White House and received a tip that Nixon would be playing at a golf course near his residence in San Clemente. Bowser’s editors were skeptical, Kelley recalled her saying, but she received permission to rent a car and visit the course.

Sure enough, Nixon was there. He granted Bowser one of his first post-presidential interviews, leading CBS anchor Walter Cronkite to offer his congratulations in a telephone call, Bowser said. (As she told it, network producers expressed their appreciation in a different way, sending a helicopter to pick her up while leaving the rental car stranded in the parking lot.)

Bowser later went overseas to cover African and Middle Eastern affairs, and co-anchored a youth-oriented news program — “30 Minutes,” a play on the network’s successful series “60 Minutes” — with newsman Christopher Glenn.

She briefly left journalism in the 1980s to raise her sons and work in real estate but returned to freelance for “NewsHour” before becoming a Denver-based correspondent in the mid-1990s. At the time, the show was presented by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, who were succeeded in recent years by Woodruff and the late Gwen Ifill.

Bowser “was a journalist who always felt she could do a little more digging to get to the bottom of a story,” said Murrey Jacobson, “NewsHour’s” senior producer for national affairs. She was particularly proud of her coverage of the levees in New Orleans, where she reported on design problems that contributed to catastrophic flooding after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.