For TV reporters covering fires in L.A., the tragedy gets personal
Jacob Soboroff, a national correspondent for NBC News with deep roots in the community, showed viewers the remains of his family’s former home on Frontera Drive in Pacific Palisades.
This week, Soboroff visited the site of a nearby playground where he romped as a child. His father, longtime civic leader Steve Soboroff, had led the effort to renovate the recreation facility after it fell into disrepair. It was gone. The home of his pregnant sister’s in-laws, where she was staying during her own home’s renovation, was also leveled.
Soboroff no longer lives in Pacific Palisades. But he knows its now-unrecognizable streets as well as if he had a Google map in his head, he told The Times.
“The pictures don’t match the muscle memories,” he said. “I grew up here and we’d do ... drills in school for an earthquake. It looks like what the city would look like after the Big One, not after a wildfire.”
Those feelings are now all too familiar. The world watched as large parts of the Los Angeles area burned this week, giving ample TV time to the national correspondents based in the city.
The stunning devastation that engulfed Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other neighborhoods entered the national consciousness through wall-to-wall TV news coverage, overshadowing major news events such as the funeral of former President Carter and the sentencing of Donald Trump in his New York hush money case. The unprecedented inferno filled screens with shocking images since Tuesday.
Often the biggest challenge for the L.A.-based journalists, who worked around the clock since the blazes broke out, was coping with their own emotions, fears and feelings of loss as they reported on their home city’s transformation into scenes that resembled war zones.
Fox News correspondent Jonathan Hunt reported on the flames that encroached Palisades Charter High School, where his 17-year-old daughter is a student. While informing viewers about the threat, he privately worried she would be back to remote learning after losing a year in the classroom during the pandemic.
Hunt was relieved that the school “was largely OK,” but local landmarks where he spent time with his children were wiped out.
“I was just wandering around the village area just now and much of the retail is gone,” he said. “The Starbucks we used to stop at so many days after school is just gone.”
Longtime CNN correspondent Nick Watt told viewers on Wednesday how after he finished his reporting he was headed to his home in Santa Monica to hose it down, hoping it would deter embers from starting a blaze.
“It’s extraordinary to cover something like this in your own community,” he said. “I’ve been covering fires for a long time. You have sympathy for people. Now I have empathy.”
Correspondents said they were deluged by West Coast-based colleagues, friends and strangers asking them to check if their homes were still standing.
Soboroff noted that having his reports stream on NBC News Now and social media sites such as TikTok brought in requests from around the world. In some cases, he didn’t have to check, knowing that whole blocks in Pacific Palisades were in ruins.
Hunt received inquiries as well, and went a step further for Kennedy, a former MTV host who is now a contributor at Fox News.
Kennedy, who was in New York, asked Hunt to enter her Palisades home, located less than 100 yards from structures that were gutted by the flames. She wanted him to gather certain framed family photographs and drawings made by her children. Hunt entered the undamaged structure, where he also retrieved a sword one of Kennedy’s relatives saved from World War I.
“I was dreading the idea of going to this friend’s house and having to send a photo of rubble,” Hunt said. “Thank God that I didn’t.”
Nancy Loo, a veteran Los Angeles-based reporter for NewsNation, was on the case Tuesday morning as she and her camera operator Nathan Fiery had covered numerous wildfires along the West Coast since she joined the network in 2020. They started traveling toward the blaze when they saw smoke in the direction of Culver City.
Loo joined NewsNation so she could be closer to family members, who she said were spared from the danger and destruction. But Fiery had been evacuated from his Hollywood Hills home and worked with the fear that it would be gone. (It was spared.)
Loo made her bones as a local New York anchor who reported for eight hours straight during the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. She moved on to become a reporter on Chicago’s WGN, where she frequently started her day covering a homicide that occurred overnight.
The destruction of Pacific Palisades is yet another traumatic scene she has to process, one of many over a long career.
“I’ve learned to compartmentalize because it does take an emotional toll,” Loo said.
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