Reporting from Capitol Hill: Lauretta Brown (’13)

With the new year close at hand, Lauretta Brown (’13) finds herself commemorating two significant anniversaries. It was a little over a year ago that she became a fulltime reporter at the Cybercast News Service (CNS) — and shortly thereafter that she unsettled House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi with a frank question about abortion.

Just weeks into her job at CNS, Miss Brown went to Mrs. Pelosi’s weekly press briefing to query the California Congresswoman about her opposition to the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Eschewing the distracting political angles, Miss Brown cut to the chase, asking, “Is an unborn child 20 weeks into pregnancy a human being?”

When the Minority Leader responded with the usual pro-abortion boilerplate, Miss Brown’s CNS colleague pressed further. “My question is pretty simple,” she began. “Legislation aside, when it comes to the matter of whether or not an unborn child is a human being at 20 weeks’ gestation, what is your personal take on it? If it is not a human being, then what do you believe it is?”

A simple question, to be sure, but one to which Mrs. Pelosi refused to provide a straightforward answer. “She was dumbfounded, offended. She would not answer,” Miss Brown recalls. “She said she had been around a lot longer than I had. She said she was a Catholic mother, and she knew more about having babies than the Pope. She raised up all kinds of tangential issues, but never answered directly.”

Asking the tough and important — but too often overlooked — questions, Miss Brown says, is among her greatest joys as a political reporter. “I try to find stories that maybe are not being reported on as much,” particularly those that touch upon matters of the right to life, religious freedom, and the plight of Christians in the Middle East. “That’s our mission, to find stories that aren’t being reported as widely, and bring those to life.”

Yet when she graduated from the College in 2013, Miss Brown did not envision a career in journalism. She intended to become a lawyer, and was considering offers from law schools when a friend told her about an internship at CNS — a short-term commitment, or so she thought when she agreed to take the position. She soon, however, developed a love for journalism and set aside all thoughts of law school. In short order, her internship turned into a trial position that, last December, became a fulltime job.

Since then, Miss Brown has worked to report the untold stories from Capitol Hill. She has interviewed numerous notable figures political, cultural, and religious, including presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, entertainers Geena Davis and Leona Lewis, and Church prelates such as His Eminence Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston, and His Excellency William Lori, Archbishop of Baltimore.

When cutting through politician’s all-too-common dissimulations, she says, she finds herself drawing upon her Thomas Aquinas College education. “Smart reporting is always improved through critical thinking, looking at statements, and saying, ‘OK, what is factual about this?’” she observes. “I have been shocked at how much, in conversations and in my writing, I’ve been able to draw back on my experience from the College. It has been a tremendous help.”