Campbell Brown.(television journalist)

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck. Photographed by Alex Majoli.

Redefines common sense, hunts down the details, and tells it like it is.

"People are more intelligent than television would have them be"

In the CNN studio not long before Election Night, I watched Campbell Brown interview Madeleine Albright for her show, Campbell Brown: No Bias. No Bull. Tall, energetic, and somehow willowy although three months pregnant, Brown exuded such forthright cogency and positive cheer that even the gloomy Albright seemed heartened. Brown asked Albright to touch on the problems facing the next president. The former secretary of State launched into an urgent list: the international financial crisis, the handling of terrorism, the broken nuclear nonproliferation treaty, globalization, energy, food prices, climate change, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the problems posed by North Korea, the Middle East, and Pakistan. At the end, Albright leaned forward and said, "You've been great" and added, "You have to be who you are, and you've been doing it brilliantly."

"People are more intelligent than television would have them be," said Brown.

Described by The New York Times on the occasion of her 2006 marriage to the Republican strategist Dan Senor as "spunky yet shrewd," Campbell Brown is a great deal more than that. She slipped into the anchor's chair of CNN's Election Center in time for Super Tuesday last February, and found her voice. Over the next months, her editorial pleas for rational thought and her probing of guests created viral Internet clips and Election Night ratings that pulled CNN out of the cable fog and put it on a par with ABC. By October 21, Election Center was renamed Campbell Brown: No Bias. No Bull.

Born in 1968 in Louisiana, where her father was a Democratic state senator, she studied in Denver, taught English in Prague when VA clav Havel was newly elected, and returned to the United States to intern seven days a week at three different TV stations. Her first job was in Topeka, Kansas, where she covered the statehouse. "I was a kid in a candy store," she says. She went to NBC, where she worked as White House correspondent, covered Katrina and Abu Ghraib, and ended up subbing for Brian Williams. Her main gig was coanchor of the Weekend Today show, where she often curled her fingers into quote marks. On her CNN show, she tends to use her whole hands, palms up, as if weighing the larger issue.