“It’s awful to watch the community that you were born and raised in literally burned to the ground,” says NBC News correspondent — and Pacific Palisades native — Jacob Soboroff, who has spent virtually every waking hour since the wildfires broke out on Jan. 7 covering the tragedy from the front lines, otherwise known as his hometown.
“It’s just endless misery,” he says. “And to be from here, it’s a weird kind of cognitive dissonance, where I’m both in it as a reporter and devastated emotionally like everybody else. But I’m also very proud to be from the Palisades and in a way, to be one of the voices that’s able to represent this community, to understand what it is.”
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At a moment when the TV business is in a state of decline, when tech moguls like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg dismiss “legacy media” as being “obsolete,” a crisis like the Los Angeles fires reasserts just how valuable TV can be, and not just national newscasts like the one Soboroff is a part of, but the local news stations that have been delivering round-the-clock, wall-to-wall coverage from the heart of the crisis for days on end.
Indeed, local news in particular has proven to be a critical piece of infrastructure, providing up-to-the-minute evacuation orders, live video of fast-moving fires and tough questioning of officials during press conferences. While social media has been a cesspool of toxicity, forcing users to figure out for themselves what’s real and what’s fiction (or perhaps an AI-enhanced hoax), local reporters on the ground have been grilling leaders directly, searching for answers even as the fires still burn.
“They are performing a public service in the most literal sense,” Soboroff says.
KCAL reporter and anchor Jasmine Viel is one of those local journalists who’s been reporting on the fires all week. She says a slew of viewers have reached out to her personally, desperately seeking information about their homes or neighborhoods.
“I can’t tell you how many people have messaged me or sent me an email or even tried to find me on social media,” she says, “just to ask me if I could tell them, is their home still standing? Can I send them a picture of their street?”
“It is both rewarding and exhausting,” agrees KTLA anchor John Fenoglio. “You feel like you can show the power of broadcast journalism, despite the tragedy unfolding all around you. This is our bread and butter, breaking news, and it’s what we’re good at, and it’s why local news is important and useful.”
But, of course, it’s not just the local newscasters who have a personal connection to the crisis; like Soboroff — and his NBC colleague Katy Tur, who also grew up in the Palisades — many national journalists covering the fire come from the region, or have family living here, which has given their reporting a more intimate touch than when dispatched to disasters in other more far-flung parts of the world.
“If I grew up in Minnesota and had to come out here to cover the fires, I’d have no idea what I was doing or where I should be going,” says Fox News national correspondent Bill Melugin, who was raised in Orange County. “But if you grew up in SoCal, you grew up with fire. When I was 3 years old, we had the Laguna Canyon Fire in ’93 that almost burned our house down.”
Matt Gutman, chief national correspondent for ABC News, found himself in the smoldering ruins of his aunt’s house in the Palisades, collecting whatever documents and objects he and his team could find from a safe that the fire melted open. “I’m picking up jewelry that’s so hot, I had to just stuff it in my pockets,” he says. “But I wanted to get it out before anybody could see the safe gaping open, or before any more damage was done to family heirlooms that were my great grandmother’s.”
Jonathan Vigliotti, national correspondent for CBS News, didn’t grow up in L.A. but, like many national news crews, he resides here now. “I live in the Hollywood Hills, a far enough distance away from [the Palisades] fire, but my husband was in constant communication, asking me what we were seeing and if he should evacuate. And I remember telling him at the time — this is Tuesday — ‘You are fine.’ How wrong I was, because the next day my home was placed under mandatory evacuation. So, I’m covering the fire in the Palisades as my husband, my friends, all my neighbors had to evacuate.”
“We have team members here who have lost their homes in the fire,” says Tim Wieland, president and general manager of KCAL and KCBS. “We currently have 15 employees who are under an evacuation order. We have other employees whose homes are damaged by the fire and they don’t know when they’re going to be able to get back in to see if the homes are even livable anymore.” Wieland adds that employees have had to leave the newsroom to help friends and family evacuate or deal with a personal crisis, only to return the same day, cognizant of how important the work they are doing is.
“Typically, when we do a story on TV, we focus on something small, so we’ll find the worst of it and focus on that,” Gutman says of the enormity of the catastrophe he and his colleagues have been covering. “But in this story, in the Palisades fire and the aftermath of the Altadena fire, it’s the opposite. The camera can’t quite catch the scope of what the naked eye can see.”
At times, that personal connection to the area can create the sort of heart-tugging drama usually found in primetime. While traveling through the Palisades to cover the fire, for instance, Soboroff was stunned to discover that his childhood synagogue was still standing, a moment he leaned into during his coverage.
“I know how important it is, not just for our audience, but for people like me, who grew up here, to know that it’s not all gone, and that over time, it’ll be back,” he says. “There’s something about all this that’s ingrained in your bones, that’s always in the back of your head as an Angeleno. You know that you coexist with nature in a way that a lot of urban places don’t. But to see it play out — that’s something else.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
