Caribbean Connection : Abby Phillip, CNN's Anchor

One Caribbean Nation.

Political pundit

ANCHOR WITH TRINBAGO ROOTS CREATING STIR

CNN’s rising star Abby Phillip is getting a chance to shine on her own. The CNN recently announced the network’s new Washington-based anchor roles. Within that release came the news that Phillip has been promoted to senior political correspondent and will be taking the reins of Inside Politics Sunday from John King. So, CNN viewers will now be able to tune into Phillip every Sunday morning from 8 to 9 a.m. starting January 24th.

Fans of the show will note that Phillip is no stranger to the Inside Politics set, having been a member of the show’s roundtable in 2015 and even filling in for King last month— perhaps as an undisclosed opportunity for Phillip to test drive the anchor role.

Phillip was born in Virginia to parents June and Dr Carlos Phillip. Her parents are originally from Sangre Grande.

They migrated to the US in 1985 and returned to Trinidad and Tobago in 1988 when she was a few months old. She returned to the US when she was eight.

The news comes after an election cycle that brought the 31-year-old regular screen time on CNN as a political correspondent covering the 2020 election. Last January, Phillip co-moderated the seventh Democratic presidential debate, and that performance teed her up for a growing role at the network.

In November, Phillip co-anchored CNN’s electioncoverage staple, Election Night In America, alongside Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. It was in this role, Phillip’s first on-air election coverage gig, that viewers and other media outlets began to take notice of Phillip in a big way.

Harper’s Bazaar called Phillip an “election star in her own right” praising her “astute commentary, cool composure and unfaltering glow.” InStyle similarly applauded her wealth of political knowledge and on-camera coolness—even going so far as to say viewers were “lucky to bear witness” to her career trajectory.

Finally, in a widely-shared profile, New York Times features reporter Katherine Rosman predicted Philip’s rise to stardom was only just beginning and dubbed her “next-gen CNN.”

With the news of Philip’s promotion, it would seem that the next-generation is very much here, and just in time for Phillip to follow a new White House administration.

Phillip’s takeover of Inside Politics Sunday later this month will usher in a slew of on-air changes from the network set to roll out in the coming weeks. Perhaps most notably, Dana Bash, Pamela Brown and Jim Acosta are all being promoted to anchor positions alongside Phillip, marking a “hard news direction” for reporting on the Biden administration, according to the network.

Certainly a testament to the decision to magnify the voices of CNN’s brightest minds, Phillip’s anchor role also says a lot about the tone the network hopes to set in the coming months.

Phillip is a Harvard grad and the daughter of immigrants.

She’s seen America from both the inside and from afar, having split her childhood between Maryland and Trinidad and Tobago.

Phillip is as politically astute as they come and, at the same time, tuned into the thoughts and concerns of everyday Americans. She’s also a Black woman in America at a time where the nation is wrestling with a renewed civil rights moment. Phillip’s perspective, and by extension, her American experience, is wholly unique. At the same time, viewers are captivated by her because she feels somehow accessible and uniquely relatable.

She stands out in a sea of talking heads because she never sounds like a garden variety political pundit, and she doesn’t try to. Perhaps most intriguing is the way Phillip manages to evoke a characteristically calming presence alongside the ever-scrolling, never subtle breaking news chyrons for a world that’s watching history play out in real-time, on a daily basis.

While many journalists, undoubtedly Phillip included, are certainly hoping the presidential transition will bring a mini-reprieve from the onslaught of surprise, around-the-clock White House news alerts, the news cycle will surely march on.

At a time when American anxiety has reached an all-time high, it’s clear CNN is hoping to bring a little levity and authenticity to meet the moment.

Above all, it says that the voice of a Black woman in America is one that needs to be elevated and that when Abby Phillip talks, America listens. (Forbes.com)