Interview: Gretchen Carlson on 'Getting Real'

The day I interviewed Gretchen Carlson for her book, Getting Real, the White House had received a bomb threat, announced near the same time as her morning show on Fox News, "The Real Story."

Like one of her colleagues, Shepard Smith says often, "Breaking news changes everything."

In Carlson's case, breaking news puts her smack dab in the middle of her comfort zone.

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"I feel totally comfortable when breaking news happens. I think it's from all those years of playing the violin… I actually get more relaxed," says the former Miss America, who credits her selection as the top contestant in 1989 primarily to her performance on the stringed instrument during the pageant.

Getting Real is Carlson's first book and she touches on a lot about her childhood in Minnesota, growing up as a violin prodigy, college at Stanford and Oxford, her win as Miss America, and her "first in-the-trenches years as a reporter."

She told me that she wrote the book because she wanted to give women of all ages (and men) an inspirational guide on how to succeed despite much adversity.

"Sometimes people have this impression of national news people or any kind of celebrity that things have come easily or they just one day woke up and everything was sort of given to them," Carlson explained. "I want to really show the real side of me and show that nothing has come easy to me.

"Failure builds who we are, gives us strength, and it makes us appreciate success so much more later on. The most important thing in life for me is to be real."

She said that some of the adversity she's faced has come by way of detractors questioning her ability to succeed. However, she says the instances have emboldened her desire to succeed.

"Detractors have sort of been a theme in my life. Sometimes I read my mean tweets on my show and undoubtedly every other one is about being a 'dumb blonde' or a 'bimbo' or something like that. It seems to be the fallback position when they just don't like you and when they don't agree with you and they don't want to debate you so it's just easier for them to throw out this moniker that I've heard ten gazillion times before," Carlson said.

Viewers at Fox News were able to witness her convictions on faith and religion when she questioned on-air the validity of legislatures and advocates in the state of Washington who were considering the petition of an individual to display a "Festivus Pole" near a Nativity scene on government property. She says it was "a moment that changed everything."

"Trust me, I love to have fun and I have a great sense of humor. It wasn't that I didn't get the joke," Carlson told me. "It was that I thought, 'For goodness sake, we've come to this point where we are actually going to honor somebody with a petition for a fake holiday? That pole is going to be next to the baby Jesus in a manger?' It seemed sacrilegious to me."

Sharing her personal stories about family and her faith have now often become a part of her show along with the news of the day.

"I'm one of the few national news anchors who openly talks about my faith," she said. "I guess that takes guts. It just kind of comes naturally to me to be honest, but I don't know why more people don't do it. We live in this PC society where we're all just supposed to be quiet about what we believe in."

When asked about what current events that she's reporting on fascinate her the most she answered, "Terror. Terror number one because I don't think anything else in this nation matters if we are not here anymore. We can talk until we are blue in the face about domestic issues, immigration, school choice, common core, and all these other things, but to me, first and foremost, if we don't keep the country safe then none of that really matters because it could all be gone."

She continued, "There's all kinds of news out there. There's entertainment news, there's hard news, international news, and the lines have been blurred so dramatically since the time I got into the news business. It used to be that you really had to make a choice between entertainment news and hard news.

"I had a lot of opportunities to go into entertainment news after being Miss America and I chose to not to because I thought I was taking the path where people were going to take me more seriously. Now, those lines have been significantly blurred over the last couple of decades. I think that's one of the reasons Fox is so popular is because we still cover international news, we still cover issues that are important to our nation, not just go with what happens to be the tabloid story of the day.

"I do think all of those cultural stories are important and we should pay attention to them but I don't know if they should be the lead story every night. I still think that we have some pretty serious issues going on in society. [In regards to] terror we were told that had gone away but I don't think that's the case at all and we live in a whole new world since 9-11."

Yes, breaking news changes everything and I agree with Carlson on several counts. Maybe it's time we should all be getting real.

On the Web: gretchencarlson.com.

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