Kathie Lee and Hoda
Hoda Kotb is a correspondent on Dateline NBC. She is host of Your Total Health. She appears on NBC News.
She grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, where being Egyptian–American, she says, had its ups and downs. It started on the first day at school each year, she recalls, when the teacher would come to her name and say, “And this next name is, well—a typo, I think!” But she also remembers kids asking her, “‘Have you ever seen the pyramids?’ And of course we had, every summer.”
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Each evening, her father, who taught at West Virginia University, would grill the family on the day’s news at the dinner table. “‘What’s happening with the Egyptians and Israelis today?’” he would ask. “We had to learn.”
At Virginia Tech University, Hoda studied political science and, drawn to the immediacy of television, broadcast journalism.
In 1986, she started anchoring, moving from Greenville, Mississippi to Moline, Illinois to Ft. Myers, Florida, then up to WWL-TV, the CBS affiliate in New Orleans. There, reporters helped decide what they covered, and for Kotb, that meant a story in Egypt. “I have a great aunt, Mufida Abdulrahman, one of the first women lawyers in Egypt. I interviewed her on the steps of the courthouse, bouncing down the stairs in her beret, people calling out to her. She was like a rock star, yet so well respected,” she recalls of her series. “Suddenly, I knew where I came from.”
In 1998, NBC hired her and moved her to New York. From there, she has covered many global stories. Arriving in Baghdad, she says, “I did not see 10,000 Saddam Husseins: I saw people who looked like my uncles and aunts. Others saw Iraqis as possible enemies: I saw them as family.”
Covering the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, she recalls: “What blew me away about the tsunami was its magnitude. I remember being in the Thai countryside, sitting on a pile of, well, stuff. An old woman saw me and handed me an orange. She had nothing, and she handed me an orange.”
She won a 2002 Edward R. Murrow Award, a 2003 Gracie Award and a 2004 Headliner Award, but much of her success she credits to her heritage. “When you have a connection with a place, you see it through different eyes. The Arab world is a second home for me. Sometimes, when you have lived in a place, you talk about it much more knowledgeably.”
Hoda Kotb had no idea when she and Kathie Lee Gifford joined forces on the fourth hour of the "Today" show that they would become "Saturday Night Live" fodder. But Hoda, who notes she's happier than ever, says bring it on.
"Kath and I, when we started having cocktails on the air, knew it was fun, but we didn't know it was gong to explode into something," Hoda tells me on the set of my HDNet talk show, "Naughty But Nice With Rob." "With her, you never know. I don't know what she is going to say or do, and I live most of the show in terror, in fear that she will ask me about my divorce yet again."
But it's not just Hoda's work life that's skyrocketing. She has found a great guy, Jay, who despite being called her "imaginary boyfriend" on "SNL," is very real and maybe the one.
"He is a sweet guy," Hoda beams. "By the way, when 'SNL' was spoofing the fact that I have a pretend boyfriend, they can scratch my ass. He's a great guy. ... You know that, Rob."
And although Hoda thinks the folks on the 8th floor at the real 30 Rock have their parodies down pat, Kathie Lee has her own opinion of the spoof spots.
"One day they are spoofing the 'Today' show, and you look up and see someone that looks exactly like Kathie Lee, and Kathie goes, 'That's nothing like our show,' and I go, 'That's exactly like watching our show,'" Hoda laughs. "It's our show without changing the script. I always get a kick out of it. I laugh every time they do it."
Video
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/12/hoda-kotb-boyfriend-jay-snl-spoofs-today_n_1202947.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl2%7Csec3_lnk1%26pLid%3D127454http://thestir.cafemom.com/entertainment/2896/kathie_lee_and_hoda_kotbhttp://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200602/calling.helen.thomas.htm
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