How The Newly Minted ‘NBC News Now’ Anchor Brings An ‘Additional Layer Of Empathy’ To The Job

For the last several years, Morgan Radford, an NBC News correspondent, could be seen on the front lines of history, reporting from major national breaking news events, and often working to shed light on stories at the nexus of race and politics. Sometimes, she’d fill in on the anchor desk, too, for NBC programming. 

Now, Radford has landed her own show with the network — she will join Aaron Gilchrist on the anchor desk for NBC News’ live-streaming outlet, NBC News Now, which runs on several platforms, including Peacock, The Roku Channel, and YouTubeTV. From noon to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday, Radford will co-anchor the show. It’s an exciting new venture for Radford, who says stories on this platform will have “more room to breathe” from the stories reported on linear television.  

Radford will also continue her reporting duties for MSNBC, The Today Show, and NBC Nightly News, something she says was important to her as she embarks on this journey.

Radford has been with NBC News for around five-and-a-half years; before NBC, she worked for Al Jazeera and ABC News. Her journey to this moment wasn’t traditional and almost didn’t happen.

From Greensboro, North Carolina, where Radford was raised, she attended Harvard University, where she didn’t major in journalism. While there, she won a raffle to go to DC, where she was introduced to the first journalist she’d ever met in her life.

“I remember leaving, thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, she has to have the best career in the world because she gets to listen to everybody— like everybody— from Barack Obama to Paris Hilton,'” Radford explained.

“And I just kind of thought that it sounded cool, but It didn’t seem possible. It seemed like the type of job that was reserved for famous or rich people, or connected people, none of which I was.”

But Radford couldn’t stop thinking about that career path or how to go from “being this random girl to being an incredibly thoughtful person on the screen.” 

She learned she needed a resume reel. 

During this time, Radford moved to South Africa for her Fulbright Fellowship; while there, she applied to Columbia Journalism School’s graduate program, hoping here, she could grow and gain the skills she needed to be a journalist. 

Columbia rejected her. 

“I remember crying and calling my mom and saying, ‘How can I even do this job if someone won’t even let me pay them to teach me how to do the job?'” she said.

Radford cried it out for a few days before deciding to ask Fulbright for $1,000 in grant money — which she was awarded. From there, she sent it to her father, who sent her back ten, $100 Kodak flip cameras. Radford used those cameras to document underserved communities in South Africa. She also drove five hours to the only Apple store in the country and taught herself how to edit on Final Cut Pro.

She came back to America with a short documentary. 

Radford then applied to small, local TV stations around the country, hoping to land a gig. No one would hire her.

“I remember driving back from Augusta, Georgia, where I had just been rejected to my face at this interview,” she said. 

“So I drive back, I’m crying. My mom’s like, ‘Maybe you should apply to Columbia again?’ And I said, ‘No, they didn’t want me, they already said that.’ She’s like, ‘But you’ve done this documentary thing, maybe give it a shot.'”

When Radford got home, she realized the deadline for the Columbia application was the following day. She applied. She was accepted. 

“I wanted to do it; I wasn’t sure if I could do it, but fought like hell to be able to do it,” she said.

Radford has since become a renowned journalist, filing reports about unique and essential topics, many close to her heart. As a Black American with Cuban and Jamaican roots, she often reports on politics, culture, and race — something that was even more crucial during and after the election of former President Donald Trump.

After Trump’s candidacy was announced in 2015, Radford says, she started noticing a trend of people running for office with ‘white power’ agendas.

“There have been racist, white supremacist candidates that have run throughout the history of this country, but the explicitness with which they were doing it, as an open part of a platform, that was new,” Radford said. 

“And so we call the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center), and we’re like, ‘We’re not crazy. Are we seeing what we think we’re seeing?’ And they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve been tracking them. There are a record number of public and open white supremacists running for office this year – unlike any we’ve ever seen.'”

Radford began reaching out and interviewing the candidates. She recollected interviewing Arthur Jones, who ran for Congress in Chicago’s third district. During the interview, Radford said, Jones expressed that he viewed Black people as “stupid” and having a lower IQ. Radford responded, “I went to Harvard.” 

“And at that moment, you can see him processing, like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this girl is a brown girl,'” Radford said. “And he goes, ‘Well, it must be your white blood that got you in.’ And it [this story] resonated with so many of our viewers because it was someone who finally was saying the quiet part out loud.”

“And for me, that story was impactful, and it’s influenced a lot of the other stories that I continue to tell because it’s how this thinking that we know exists in this country has now infiltrated into mainstream American politics.”

For Radford, it isn’t necessarily easy hearing these types of views, especially as a mixed-race person, but she says her diversity makes her uniquely primed to tell these stories. 

“I think what being a diverse person does, is it builds this additional layer of empathy, and you’re able to hear in an almost dispassionate way that helps you understand and bring those conversations that are happening around dinner tables to the public,” she said.

But when confronting and interviewing white supremacists and Nazis, Radford says, courage is a requirement. It was certainly needed through 2020, as Radford and her colleagues reported on national tragedies like the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the many officer-involved shootings resulting in the death of Black men and women. 

For Radford, when these situations happen, she imagines her little brother or her father. 

“Seeing boys who look like my brother, being killed over a bag of Skittles, or a man thrown on the ground with a knee on his neck— and those are just the ones we see. Anyone who grew up like me, or especially those of us in the south, we know, there are tons of stories that go untold and unseen every single day,” Radford said.

“And so that is hard to metabolize— thinking of the people who you love in your life who raised you and gave you life, looking like the victims of violent crime. That’s uncomfortable.“

But what gives her hope, Radford says, is that the country is seemingly getting better at having vital conversations about race in America. She describes a time when Colin Kaepernick was maligned and couldn’t find a job after kneeling for the National Anthem, but now, there are countless ‘raise awareness’ campaigns when watching the Super Bowl. She also believes the way the country is moving forward in talking about diversity is heartening, and the mere fact that in 2021, she and her co-anchor, who are both Black, were chosen to anchor their new show, shows a sign of change. 

“Growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, I never would have thought, if there was already a person of color in the seat, that I would have also been able to have a seat,” Radford said.

“That just wasn’t something that you saw. And frankly, it’s not something you often see now, but we’re doing it, and we’re doing it because we’re qualified.”

Radford’s first day on the new anchor desk for her show was April 12. She says viewers can expect fresh, unique storytelling that might not have the time to be told on linear television and will compliment the stories seen on The Today Show or Nightly News. 

“We’re doing this in the middle of the day. So we’re not previewing the news. We’re not recapping the day of the news. We are bringing them the news as it happens in real-time,” Radford said.

“These are stories that are for us, by us, by our generation, by an America that is diverse as we are, and stories that are dedicated to and sometimes sourced by the viewers.”