By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
It’s 6 o’clock in the morning and Peter Alexander is more cheerful than anyone has a right to be at this hour. But then, he should be. At 25, he’s already anchoring the “Q-13 Morning News” and the media is comparing him to NBC
“Today” show host Matt Lauer. Pretty good for a nice Jewish boy from Oakland, Calif.
“I guess I dream still of making it to the national level, where you really effect change at a much larger level,” Alexander said in a recent interview at the KCPQ newsroom after his on-air shift was over.
Peter said he has been aiming for this since he was a high school freshman, “not so much to be a news anchor,” he said, “as to be a news reporter. To cover stories, it didn’t matter in what regard.” After interviewing a number of local reporters for a school assignment, Peter set up his own internship with one at the Fox station in San Francisco, KTVU.
“I called him or wrote him letters once a month, then one month I called him and he said, ‘What do you want from me?’ ” Alexander recalled. “I said, ‘I guess just watch you.’ ” From then on, he went to the station once a week “to watch him do what he did.” On his recommendation, Alexander went to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Even before he finished college, Peter Alexander was gaining recognition. He was sent by the school to Lexington, Ky., where he joined a team of investigative reporters who shook up the local political scene, winning him the first of several journalism awards at age 20.
“The award wasn’t so significant as that you’d made a difference, that it’d affected change in the community. I am 20 years old and I got the mayor of Lexington, Ky., to change the by-laws of the city. That’s a pretty neat experience.” Alexander said. He was hooked for sure.
“I can’t articulate it, but the rush of knowing that you have an exclusive story,” he said, “that you’re the only one who knows something and you’re allowed to share it, [letting] people have a better idea of what’s going on in their community. That is a great feeling.”
Following a stint in Kentucky following graduation, Peter Alexander relocated to eastern Washington for more than two years, during which he covered the Spokane serial murders and the eventual arrest of Robert Yates. Another big story, and Peter had the exclusive.
“I like the digging — the process of trying to find it,” said Peter. “What fired me up, sincerely, was to be making contacts, and ultimately being the only local news guy who had contacts on the task force itself — those relationships that I developed over the course of two-plus years,” he added, “never thinking they were going to find the guy.”
Being one of the few Jewish journalists in the Spokane area when the Aryan Nations was active in nearby Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, Alexander said he argued regularly for his station not to cover the neo-Nazi organizations’ parades and demonstrations. Alexander argued that treating the Nazi marches as news simply awarded them the publicity they were looking for. “Acknowledge that it’s happening and then say what people are doing in the community to put an end to this.” Before his stint in Spokane, he said, Nazis were “something I read about in textbooks, not something I ever anticipated I’d encounter face-to-face.”
In March of last year, Peter moved over the mountains to join KCPQ’s news department as a weekend anchor and news reporter. This past January he took on the anchor desk on the Morning News..
“The first day I got here, the first thing I did, knowing one person in this city,” said Peter, “I went to the Jewish Community Center. It was the safest thing to do — just go to the JCC. Of course,” he said, before long a “nice Jewish mom was showing me around and showing me a picture of her daughter.”
Judaism has been a constant influence in Peter’s life. He grew up in a Reform congregation in Oakland, where he still goes to attend services when he is home for Pesach or other occasions.
“I really looked up to my rabbi. I was very much inspired by my rabbi,” Alexander said. “When I came back from college, he took me out to dinner and said, ‘I’d like you to become a rabbi. You can effect change, you can affect people’s lives. You can become a leader in the community — all the things why I love doing the news.
“I said, ‘Rabbi, there I’m only affecting the Jewish community. I think, I have Jewish values, why don’t I use them to affect everybody?’ “
As for being an anchor, instead of being out in the field, he appreciates the benefits of being a well-known face.
“For whatever reason, people associate some sort of wisdom or sophistication with anchors. When I was a reporter, I’d be beating down doors. They’d help me out, but they wouldn’t do a lot,” he said. “I go out and do a charity event … and all of a sudden they raise ten or fifteen thousand dollars; if that’s how you effect change, that’s as a good a means as any other.
“I enjoy morning news,” Peter Alexander said. “I get away with smiling more and being a positive influence in people’s lives more often than not.” He also admitted to liking the shot of adrenaline he gets from doing live television. “It’s just the sense that anything could happen at any time. To me, that’s just a rush.”
For now, he said his ambitions have begun to mellow. “I used to say that I want to host the ‘Today’ show, which I think I still do, but I just want to be a happy, fulfilled person and have a wonderful family with the same Jewish traditions that I was raised with,” he said. “And that’s why I want to fall in love with a Jewish girl. That said,” he added, “there ain’t a zillion Jewish girls in Seattle. I guess I’m patient.”