Gwen Ifill on covering Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign

Journalist Gwen Ifill talks about covering Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign during the 1988 election and the unique perspective she brought to her reporting:

“I discovered [Jesse Jackson’s] crowds were not so different from the crowds of the conservative preacher in the race who was Pat Robertson…Because they were still speaking to under represented populations. That year they called it the Moral Majority. Jesse Jackson was speaking to a completely different Rainbow Coalition liberal crowd. But there was a lot of overlap that I think a lot of people missed that I got because I was a preacher’s kid and I recognized who these people were.”

Watch Gwen Ifill's full interview where she talks about her journey from The Baltimore Evening Sun to PBS NewsHour.

TelevisionAcademy.com/Interviews