NBC News correspondent Anne Thompson has been appointed the network's new environmental affairs reporter, a job she attributes in part to her battle with breast cancer. She felt the environment is an issue foremost on people's minds that had not been covered extensively on network television.
NEW YORK -- NBC News correspondent Anne Thompson has been appointed the network's new environmental affairs reporter, a job she attributes in part to her battle with breast cancer.
Thompson, who's been cancer-free since January, said Wednesday she promised herself while undergoing chemotherapy last summer to do meaningful work when she beat the disease. She felt the environment is an issue foremost on people's minds that had not been covered extensively on network television.
"The commitment that I made to myself is that I'm never going to do a stupid story and I mean that," she said. "I didn't survive cancer to do stupid stories."
Her definition of stupid stories? "I don't want to cover a seal's birthday," she said.
Global warming, alternative fuels, land usage and how new technology affects the environment are some of the stories she said she'll follow.
She's been interested in the topic since junior high school in Connecticut, when it was her job to cough and collapse onstage during an Earth Day pageant.
Thompson has been covering business news for the past six years and had been the network's chief financial correspondent since 2005. She expects many of her contacts from that beat to help her, with so many companies these days looking at their impact on the environment, she said.
Her boss, NBC News President Steve Capus, said "Anne's laser focus on this issue, and NBC News' commitment to covering it, is one more way that we distinguish ourselves in a crowded landscape of news and information."
Source: Associated Press
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