“Busier than a one-armed paper hanger” is how Kathleen Parker describes herself these days. The apt phrase references a career spike that brought the scrappy Southern newsie from syndicated columnist to Pulitzer Prize winner to national TV journalist in just short of half a year.
“I’ve always been the girl-next-door columnist,” Parker told Meredith Nelson at Newsmax magazine, adding, “My readers are what people in New York and Washington call ‘ordinary’ Americans,” she says, hastening to assure us that she has never once herself used that adjective to describe anyone who follows her maverick yet common-sense approach to the political conundrums of the day.
“I think that’s why CNN brought me in,” Parker says of her new job as the top-billed half of CNN’s Parker Spitzer, a news and political chat show that debuted Oct. 4 in the boutique spot at 8 p.m. on weeknights. “As a voice for the people who don’t feel well-represented. The over-50 crowd in Arizona deserves to have a voice on TV too.”
But make no mistake about it, though the CNN gig came somewhat out of the blue and albeit on the tails of her grabbing the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary this year, Parker’s meteoric rise was hardly an accident. The woman was never what you’d call a slacker before she landed at the CNN television studio in Manhattan’s posh Time Warner Center in June, or in the Beltway as a syndicated Washington Post writer by way of the Tribune Company four years earlier for that matter.
Parker is one of the most widely read syndicated columnists in America, printed twice weekly in more than 400 publications across the land, just not necessarily in markets served by major dailies such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, which tend to have their own stable of columnists and where Parker is not exactly a household word.
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