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| R.I.'s Elisabeth Hasselbeck talks about Vieira, Walters, new Fox morning show |
Elisabeth Hasselbeck followed in Meredith Vieira’s footsteps 10 years ago when she became a co-host of ABC’s “The View.” And on Monday, she follows former “Today” host Vieira again in leaving “The View” to join the wakeup-time TV wars — in this case, for cable network Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
It will mean a change of pace for the Cranston native. “Fox & Friends” goes on the air at 6 a.m. and runs three hours a day, while “The View” starts at 11 a.m. and spans just an hour. Plus, she will now share the spotlight with two men, co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, compared with the all-female contingent of “The View.”
“The three hours will fly by,” Hasselbeck said last week in a phone interview from New York.
Asked whether she had sought advice from such former early birds as Vieira, with whom she overlapped at “The View” for 2 1/2 years, and Gretchen Carlson, who is leaving “Fox & Friends” to host her own show in the afternoon, she said, “I’ve sought the wisdom of all.”
“The women in the industry are good at sticking together,” she said. “I lean on their wisdom.”
She said she feels a special bond with Vieira, who grew up in East Providence and, like Hasselbeck, attended an all-girls school, in Vieira’s case the Lincoln School in Providence.
“There’s always been an unspoken common sisterhood,” Hasselbeck said. “Coming from the same state, the smallest state with the biggest heart, and how we were raised.”
At the same time, she said, “it’s good to experience things on your own. I tell my kids, you’ve got to experience things on your own. You must allow experiences to happen, leave room for experiences.”
Hasselbeck, 36, grew up in Cranston, the daughter of architect Kenneth Filarski and schoolteacher and lawyer Elizabeth DelPadre. She has one brother, Kenneth Jr., a lawyer and musician. She was educated at St. Mary Academy-Bay View, an all-girls Catholic school in East Providence.
“My experience at Bay View was one of the most important opportunities that I ever had,” she said. “I had the opportunity to focus when at high school, and definitely the single-sex education helped” in terms of developing a sense of herself. By the time she got to Boston College, “I knew who I was as a student … I wasn’t figuring it out.
“I’m very aware of the sacrifices that my parents made, not just financially but getting me up in the morning and picking me up from softball,” she said. “I can’t thank my family enough for that.”
At BC, where she graduated in 1999 with a degree in fine arts, she captained the Division-I softball team to back-to-back Big East championships. She also met her future husband, former Boston College and NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck, now an ESPN sports analyst.
At the same time, Hasselbeck regards her 10 years working with Barbara Walters on “The View” — where she often provided a conservative point of view — as an education in itself.
“One could take all the tapes of her interviews, and together they would be a syllabus for a university course in broadcasting and history,” she said. “She has walked through history, and working with her was like earning a doctorate.”
Certainly, Walters is a living history of American broadcast news. Having gotten her first job in television in 1953, she has been at the center of the industry for 60 years.
“I studied her every move every day,” Hasselbeck said. “It was like working with the best golfer or best singer, 10 years by her side. I was shaped, formed and sharpened by that experience. It was a privilege … a most sacred time of learning.”
After college, Hasselbeck worked at the Boston office of Puma, designing athletic shoes. She first caught the public eye in 2001 as a finalist on “Survivor: The Australian Outback,” where she finished fourth.
She subsequently hosted Style Network's “The Look for Less” before joining Walters and her team on “The View” in 2003. With her four co-hosts, she won the 2009 Annual Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host. She left the show in July to join “Fox & Friends.”
She and Tim live in Connecticut with their three children — Grace, 8, Taylor, 4, and Isaiah, 3 — but she said she is still extremely close to her family.
“My parents taught me everything I know. They gave me unconditional love.”
Tim Hasselback was raised in Norfolk, Mass., so New England is home to both.
“We love New England — it’s our home town,” she said. “We certainly try to make it up [when we can].” And, she said, “My parents are phenomenal in making the trek down to see the kids.”
Hasselbeck’s debut on “Fox & Friends” will feature a redesigned set, to be unveiled Monday morning, and a weeklong series featuring the cast of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty.” She traveled with Doocy and Kilmeade to Louisiana to shoot the series with the bearded Robertson clan.
“Steve and Brian have been more than supportive,” she said, “and I’m impressed at how hard everyone works at those early, early hours.”
Early, early hours indeed. She said she will be arriving at the studio at 4 a.m.
“We’ll have a meeting [before going live], to discuss topics and headlines, with research continually throwing news updates,” she said. “The main thing is keeping up with what’s going on in the world. I’m thrilled to be part of the team.”
“We’ve already had the opportunity to work together,” she said of Doocy and Kilmeade, noting she had been on the show promoting her books. Hasselbeck has celiac disease, which means she is gluten intolerant. She has written two books, “The G-Free Diet” (2009) and “Deliciously G Free” (2012), as well as producing NoGii, her own line of “gluten-free solutions for the whole family.”
“It already feels like family,” she said of “Fox & Friends” — “I’ve been watching it for so long, it feels like family.”
While “Fox & Friends” is an entertainment and news show, the network does carry opinion shows with a conservative point of view. However, Hasselbeck said, “I choose not to define Fox as a conservative news outlet. It’s fair and balanced, providing equal information on all sides of the issues.
“In the same way, I don’t define myself [as conservative],” she said, adding, “Clearly, everyone does it for me by describing me as ‘outspoken and conservative.’ ”
“I do think in terms of my politics that I have a compassionate heart, and I hope for the nation that my kids can have opinions that are respected,” she said. “My father is a brilliant architect who was engaging in energy-efficient design before it was cool. My parents allowed us to think for ourselves.”
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