My mom likes to say I’ve been covering news since the day I was born—longer if you count my time in utero. The day she went into labor, my parents were in Hollywood covering a shooting, a mugging gone wrong. There was no question my mom would join my dad at the scene, even if she was nine days overdue. They were a husband-and-wife reporting team, the founders of the Los Angeles News Service, so she grabbed her 17-pound tape deck, and off we went. Eighteen hours later the Tur family had another journalist in the world, though it would be more than 18 years before I knew it.
Looking back after more than a decade in live television, I suppose my career choice was inevitable. The sound of the police and fire scanner, which my parents relied on for stories, was my music box and my bedtime story. My mom says it’s the reason my first word was hot and, only half-jokingly, that my second and third were smoke and showing.
My parents got ahead in the news business with wits, guts, and a creative interpretation of “fair game.” They leased their first helicopter in 1985, when KTLA news crews were on strike. Maybe the crews had good grievances, maybe not. Either way, my parents ignored the strike and went to work. They had a one-year-old at home (me) and another kid on the way.
After a few months with KTLA, they also had $30,000. With that down payment, plus a good sales pitch, my dad convinced Bell Helicopters to lease him a $250,000 chopper. TV news would never be the same.
Bob and Marika Tur were not the first to use a helicopter, but they were the first to do something memorable with one. My dad didn’t have his license yet when they got their first big scoop: Sean Penn and Madonna’s 1985 wedding on the coast of Malibu. He hired a pilot to hover 150 feet off the bluff, so close that Madonna flipped him the finger. He sold the pictures for six figures.
Soon they had settled into a routine: Dad flying, Mom on camera. She was fearless. She’d hang out over the skids, hundreds of feet in the air, a 30-pound Betacam on her shoulder. They couldn’t send the videos live, so they flew tapes from station to station, dropping them from the copter down to the roof where a producer waited. To keep the tapes from breaking on impact, my mom wrapped them in anything she had on hand, usually clothing. On busy days it wasn’t unusual for her to get back to the hangar in her underwear.
Meanwhile, my dad filed live radio reports, his hands on the controls and his eyes on the news unfolding below him. When I was five, he started asking me to work up my own live reports. In one, I tell the story of an imaginary fire in San Diego that ended with all my friends and me having a party at McDonald’s. And you know what? I wasn’t so bad. My mom and dad were “helicopter parents,” literally. Meaning, I didn’t have a nanny, so I went up in the helicopter. My entire early childhood education consisted of tagging along while they reported on car accidents, multiple-alarm fires, and shootouts.
In elementary school I spent weekends in the air over Los Angeles. On a slow news day, my dad would fly us down to Catalina Island for lunch, or we’d fly low over the beach. Once, during the Rose Parade, I unbuckled my seat belt and opened the chopper door so I could get a better look at the floats. (Later, my dad said I almost gave him a heart attack. I wouldn’t have known—he was that cool under pressure.)
It was fun in retrospect. Kids are kids, though, and before long I thought our Christmas cards—me and my brother, with our dog, in flight headphones (see left)—were boring. Getting picked up from sleepaway camp in a helicopter was mortifying; so was the overhead cheering section during my softball games. By middle school I wanted nothing to do with the news.
I maintained that point of view even when a truck driver named Reginald Denny stopped in the wrong intersection at the wrong time at the outbreak of the 1992 L.A. riots. Bob and Marika were on the scene. When Denny got pulled from the driver’s seat by a group of gang members, they flew lower. When the mob pulled him to the ground and started kicking him, they got lower again—as low as 70 feet, close enough for bullets to damage the engine. It wasn’t about getting the shot anymore; it was about trying to save the man’s life by scaring off the crowd. But the crowd closed in, and the cops were nowhere in sight. With millions tuned in live, my dad declared that the LAPD had abandoned the city.
My brother and I watched from our grandparents’ house and then lived through the aftermath—not only of the riot but of the journalism. Gangs were angry about my parents’ coverage. We started getting death threats. My dad got his first concealed weapons permit. For years he wore a gun on his belt every day and slept with it under his pillow. Those were scary times. Not even O.J. Simpson’s strange, slow-speed car chase was enough to reignite my interest in my parents’ job. In fact, when I saw their helicopter hovering over my school one day, I was convinced they were trying to spy on me and my friends. They were not. Simpson had led cops to his house, which happened to be nearby. My parents got the footage, made some serious money, and burnished their reputation.
Then, in 1998, when I was 14, it all fell apart. The main station my parents worked with got its own helicopter. It didn’t need my parents anymore, and didn’t want to need them. My dad had a temper and was tough to work with. In the months that followed, he had heart surgery, my grandmother died, and my parents lost their bearings, both professionally and personally. The bills piled up. The fancy vacations disappeared. The rent was late. And we stopped answering the phone because it was always a bill collector. Our dwindling bank account wasn’t the worst of it; for me, it was the loss of my role models. My parents were depressed and angry. Instead of looking to find a new path, something they were always so good at, they froze like a watch in an explosion. There was no more future, only the past. The news business broke us apart.
I went off to the University of California, Santa Barbara, on a boatload of loans, sights set on becoming a doctor or a lawyer. Stable. Predictable. Then a funny thing happened during my senior year. I was driving back to Santa Barbara from Los Angeles with my college boyfriend, when we ran into a roadblock—nothing major, a brushfire in Malibu. Instead of taking the detour, I wanted to drive straight—toward the flames—to see the action. So I reached into my wallet and grabbed the press pass my dad had made for me. What the hell, I thought. Let’s see if we can get in. I pulled up to the officer guarding the road and flashed my pass.
“Who do you work for?” he asked suspiciously.
“Los Angeles News Service,” I said.
He looked down, back at me, then down again. “Where’s your gear?”
“My crew is up ahead. They have the cameras.”
“All right,” he said. “Be careful.”
My boyfriend was awestruck. “I’ve never seen you more confident than you were just now, lying to that officer,” he said.
A couple of weeks later, a school counselor was telling me what LSAT score I’d need to get into UCLA when something clicked—or unclicked. I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I wanted to chase the news. I couldn’t say why, exactly. I still hated the camera. But suddenly journalism seemed like a lot more fun than pushing paper behind a desk in a faceless office building. I told my dad about my decision over lunch. I thought he’d be excited; instead he was furious and condescending. “You might want to practice, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ because you’re never going to make it,” he said. He was convinced our name would get me blacklisted; I thought he was treating me like a child. The fight continued all the way to my front door, which I slammed in his face. We didn’t talk for a week.
I graduated in June 2005. In July of that year, I walked into my first job as a journalist—in, of all places, the KTLA newsroom. It smelled like must, dust, and videotape. Exactly as it did when I was little. I was home.
Katy Tur is a correspondent for NBC News. This piece is adapted from her book, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.
