Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum is marking 22 years with the network, publishing a personal essay this week reflecting on her career there as the channel celebrates its 30th anniversary.
MacCallum began her career at The Wall Street Journal and CNBC before joining Fox. In the essay, she recalled her first day on the job, when Jeff Hark, who oversaw scheduling for reporters and anchors, asked about her family. She had three young children at the time and initially told him she could handle the workload without needing accommodations, but said she came to appreciate that the network genuinely wanted to support young parents on staff.
She credited that environment with pushing her to take on bigger assignments early in her tenure. In her first year, she asked to join Fox’s team covering the November 2004 presidential election and volunteered to report from outside the Democratic National Convention in Boston. She ended up reporting from the convention floor alongside veteran correspondents Carl Cameron and Major Garrett, an assignment she described as the start of two decades covering elections for the network.
MacCallum also wrote about covering presidents and foreign leaders over her career, and described walking the beaches of Normandy with military veterans and collecting their stories from Berlin, Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan. She said Fox encouraged a respect for veterans that she believes she would not have found elsewhere in the industry.
She closed her essay by thanking Fox Corporation executives Lachlan Murdoch, Suzanne Scott and Jay Wallace, along with colleagues she described as family, saying the group is united by a commitment to holding the country’s leaders accountable.
