Abby Phillip is finally addressing a question that plagues every news aficionado: What do anchors talk about during commercial breaks?
“Sometimes it’s eerily quiet,” admitted Phillip, who hosts CNN’s NewsNight and this week joined The Daily Beast Podcast. “But I would say most of the time, people are talking about a lot of random things. Their kids, their pets, their chickens.”
Phillip, 36, was in 2020 one of the youngest journalists to ever moderate a Democratic presidential debate. Before joining CNN in 2017, she started her career at Politico, covered the Obama administration for ABC News, and reported on President Donald Trump’s first term for The Washington Post.
But although Phillip delves into high-stakes subjects and contentious disputes in her reporting—and certainly on her show—her offscreen relationships are a little more amiable, she told co-hosts Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee.
“Are people as collegial now as they used to be?” asked Bee. “Because that used to be just kind of the atmosphere in politics… like fight, fight, fight, but we’re all kind of getting a drink after.”
“I actually think that’s what people don’t get—how collegial people are when they’re not screaming at each other on television,” Phillip explained. “I mean, yeah… “People are meeting up after the show for drinks.”
“Look, it’s TV,” she continued. “I think that all of it is, in a way, a bit of a performance.”
(Even in the midst of nationwide chaos, there’s few things that some “dark liquor” can’t fix, she and Bee joked.)
“When I first started in journalism, it was like the before times,” said Phillip. “People were just sort of chummy. And I actually think that there was not a lot of real disagreement.”
Now, however, butting heads is the norm. People are not afraid to air their differences.
“So when they do that and then they turn around and they can still talk to each other and they can still be friends… I think that’s actually a healthy sign,” she added.
It gets a little trickier with MAGA mainstays, confessed Phillip, many of whom are booked regularly on her show. In Republican politics, she said, “Everybody is performing for an audience of one, which is Donald Trump.”
“You cannot get caught disagreeing with Trump publicly or least of all on television… that’s the perception that a lot of people have,” she added. “It’s just a fear thing.”
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