The Situation Room on CNN has entered a new era — one where co-anchors Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown are tasked with unpacking the morning’s biggest news as a team.
Blitzer had hosted the daily program since 2005 as an evening news broadcast, but on March 3, the network relaunched the show with an updated format and additional anchor chair. The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown is now a two-hour morning program, combining the talents of two of CNN’s strongest political reporters.
“There’s a lot of news happening [in the] late mornings, not only here in the U.S., but around the world between 10:00 and 12:00 Eastern time,” Blitzer tells PEOPLE of the show’s new time slot, which replaces CNN Newsroom following Jim Acosta’s sudden departure from the network in January. “You got to roll with the punches.”
“Any given day, there’s just so much news happening in those hours,” Brown agrees. “We build this beautiful show, and there’s a lot of throwing that out the window because of breaking news during our hours.”
The new partnership is a “full-circle” moment for Blitzer, 77, and Brown, 41, who first met in January 1994 — at the Super Bowl, of all places.
Brown’s late mother, former Kentucky first lady Phyllis George, was one of the first women to have a national role in television sports coverage, working for CBS’ The NFL Today from 1975 to 1984 after being crowned Miss America 1971.
Thanks to her parents’ friendship with the then-CNN President Tom Johnson, Brown and her family were invited to attend Super Bowl XXVIII in Atlanta, where the Dallas Cowboys were taking on Blitzer’s beloved Buffalo Bills.
“It’s pretty surreal. As a kid, I met Wolf, and I had no idea about his job. I was more intrigued and captivated by his name,” Brown admits of her 11-year-old self’s impression of her future co-anchor. “[Years later], I saw him on CNN. I believe he was covering one of the wars. I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh. I want to do that one day. I want to do what he’s doing.’ ”
“And she’s doing it,” Blitzer adds proudly.
While the 1994 championship game sadly ended in a loss for the Bills, it was the first moment in an eventual friendship between the two as Brown began chasing the journalism profession. Years later, Brown shares, she reached out to Blitzer for career advice.
“Wolf said, ‘You should come to CNN and be on The Situation Room with me,’ ” she recalls.
“It took a few years,” Blitzer chimes in, “but it happened.”
“Things have been going very, very nicely,” he adds of the new show. “I think we’re both enjoying it… And most importantly, our viewers are enjoying it.”
Brown agrees, noting, “Not everyone gets to call someone that they really looked up to and admired as a child, their colleague. So it’s really cool.”
Despite having anchored solo for much of their respective careers, the duo has quickly seen the benefits of having a full-time teammate, especially when a live show goes a bit off the rails.
“Recently, I was anchoring and my IFB [earpiece] just completely went out,” Brown shares. “I was doing an interview… and I couldn’t hear what the person was saying. And so if I didn’t have Wolf, I would’ve had to be like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,’ and go to break. But I went, like, ‘Wolf!’ and then he just jumped right in.”
The pair have also been having some fun behind the scenes with Blitzer’s “Song of the Day,” where Brown shares a clip to her Instagram Stories featuring whatever earworm her co-anchor is singing along to as they prepare for the show.
While classics like Bob Dylan and The Temptations might not surprise viewers, some of Blitzer’s choices have raised eyebrows — like the 1997 anthem “Tubthumping” by British one-hit wonder Chumbawamba.
“That’s my motto,” Blitzer reveals. “When I was doing live shots on the north lawn of the White House, I would always tell the camera crew, ‘Remember guys, I get knocked out, but I get up again.’ And that was my theme.”
Raised with a lifelong love for music — from taking piano lessons as a young boy in upstate New York to playing the saxophone and timpani in the school band — Blitzer says his “Song of the Day” choices are eclectic because he can appreciate dozens of different genres.
“When I’m in the car driving around, I usually listen to SiriusXM Radio, some of the music, pop music,” he adds. “I like to listen to Lady Gaga and some of those.”
“It’s been a fun way to kick off the show and let viewers know this other side of Wolf they don’t often get to see,” Brown shares.
It can be helpful to keep the mood light when the news turns dark. The new Situation Room launched amid growing tension between the press and Donald Trump’s White House.
A longtime critic of the media, the president has so far been no-holds-barred in his second term, even going so far as to ban The Associated Press from the Oval Office pool, earning condemnation from even conservative-leaning news outlets.
Both Blitzer and Brown have experience covering the White House, explaining the potential dangers of silencing such a major source for independent news.
“The fact that they took the Associated Press — which is one of the main news organizations in the United States, the wire service that so many newspapers and radio stations and television stations rely on for news — and they basically kick [them] out of the rotation… That is pretty serious,” Blitzer says.
“I’ve never seen anything like that from a White House, from an administration, and I think they’ve got to get their act together and move on.”
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Brown shares similar feelings, calling the AP ban “a dangerous, slippery slope.”
“I think we’re going to be watching all of this really closely,” she says. “We, obviously, stand by the AP. The government cannot control the editorial judgments of a news organization and then retaliate.”
“We have protections under the First Amendment of the Constitution. There’s a reason there’s freedom of the press as a key tenet in upholding a functioning democracy,” she continues. “And so as a former White House reporter and as a journalist for nearly two decades, I look at this and I say that this is a slippery slope and we need to be watching this very carefully.”
Amid the unprecedented moment in American politics, Blitzer and Brown are buckled up and ready for whatever comes their way.
“We’ll report the news fairly and accurately and in great detail — domestic news, political news, international news,” Blitzer promises. “That’s what [CNN founder] Ted Turner told me when he hired me many, many years ago. He said, ‘The news comes first. Don’t forget, Wolf. The vacations come second.’ And I said, ‘I understand.’ ”
The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown airs weekdays from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET on CNN.
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