Last month, Amy Robach was dry-heaving 19,000 feet in the sky. She’d just completed the final leg of a six-day trek up Mount Kilimanjaro with ten family members to commemorate her five-year anniversary of being diagnosed with breast cancer.
She had severe altitude sickness, but she’d never felt prouder.
Robach climbing Kilimanjaro with her family.
Four days after returning home to New York City, stomach settled and still feeling on top of the world, the GMA breaking news anchor meets me for lunch at The Ribbon a few blocks from ABC News’ uptown studios. She orders meatballs and a black coffee, before excitedly pulling out her iPhone to show me video (of the hike, not the dry-heaving).
“It’s always been on the bucket list, and time is never guaranteed, so if I wanted to start living, I needed to do it right now,” Robach, 45, explains when I ask why Kilimanjaro. “I…wanted my kids to realize that, if you push past pain, and you allow yourself to feel discomfort and you get to the other side of that, that’s achievement.”
If anyone knows about accomplishment, it’s Robach. The broadcast journalist is a cancer “thriver,” as she calls it, and a dedicated mom. She’s a staple on GMA and this summer she picked up a second ABC gig as coanchor of 20/20, the network’s primetime longform news show, alongside David Muir. Her first report since getting the job airs on November 16 at 10 p.m. and focuses on medical innovation. Robach sits down with Cam Underwood, the man who underwent a life-changing face transplant surgery after attempting to commit suicide by shooting himself in the face, for his first televised interview.
Robach joins a long list of successful female journalists to have coanchored the show, including Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, and, most recently, Elizabeth Vargas. But Robach wants to make the role her own. She hopes to pivot coverage slightly away from the show’s bread and butter investigative human-interest and crime pieces, and focus on news of the day.
Robach on set filming 20/20.
“We [still] love a good crime story,” she says. “But we also are willing, as a show, and as a broadcast, to react to news. We’re willing to say, hey, we may have had something else planned that we’ve been working on that week, but this story has captivated the nation, the world… we can pivot to breaking news when it’s big enough to captivate our audience for an hour.”
The example she gives is 20/20’s summer special on the Tham Luang cave rescue after 12 boys age 11 to 16 and their soccer coach got trapped in a flooded Thailand cave. It featured interviews with Carl Henderson, an English teacher at a local school in the boys’ community; Nopparat Kanthawong, the boys’ head soccer coach; and Bill Whitehouse, vice chairman of the British Cave Rescue Council.
"I love [this] part of our show... Because breaking news has always been what I love," she says.
Robach reporting at age 22.
Robach still remembers speaking to the father of a girl who’d just fatally overdosed. It was her first assignment as a cub reporter for the University of Georgia’s student television station. “I sat down with him and cried with him as he talked about his beautiful daughter,” she says. “He showed me pictures and we talked about her life and how it was this tragic thing, she did ecstasy for the first time.”
When Robach began editing her piece, she thought to herself, “Someone is going to watch this and not do drugs because of this. This could change someone’s life,” she says. “That was the moment I was like, ‘This I what I’m going to do for a living.’”
Robach reporting from Honduras during one of her first assignments.
After graduation, Robach took a breaking news reporter job at WCBD in Charleston, South Carolina. “I was excited to make my age, I was 22 making $22,000 [a year],” she says. “I was constantly at police stations, navigating court rooms… [it] was very overwhelming and daunting at first. I was thrust into this world where I needed something from other people, like police officers, yet had to try and command respect.”
She says she had to make her own luck. “I would argue that I’m here right now, sitting with you, because I said yes 99 percent of the time," she says. "I raised my hand, I put myself out there, and I walked into the news director’s offices and I said, ‘I deserve this job, I deserve this story, I deserve this assignment.’ I pushed and I was my own advocate.”
Robach interviews Justin Bieber on Today in 2010.
Robach climbed the ranks at NBC from 2003 to 2012, working at MSNBC, filling in at Today when needed, and eventually serving as co-anchor of Weekend Today. After five years in the chair, she moved to ABC News as a correspondent and, later, a news anchor for GMA.
On October 1, 2013, Robach agreed to undergo a televised mammogram on GMA for breast cancer awareness month. “You know what, Amy,” her colleague Robin Roberts, a breast cancer survivor, told her, “if one life is saved because of early detection, it’s all worth it.”
It was Robach's own life that was saved. Her on-air mammogram turned up evidence of breast cancer. She underwent a double mastectomy and eight rounds of chemotherapy—all the while continuing to appear on GMA.
“When you face fear and death in a real way, in a personal way, there’s just a connection that I have now with people who experience loss of any kind, because you feel like you understand it on a different level,” she says. “There’s more compassion in my heart, more empathy in my heart. I feel like I have a better connection with people when I talk to them about going through the unthinkable, and that’s often who I’m interviewing.”
It's why ABC news president James Goldston knew she was right for 20/20. He tells me that Robach, “brings an extraordinary emotional intelligence to her work at 20/20 and at ABC News. Time and time again, Amy has proven uniquely capable of connecting with a diverse and fascinating group of people… She is a brilliant journalist and a skilled interviewer who is making the outstanding 20/20 team even better.”
Despite being in the notoriously cutthroat world of broadcast journalism, Robach maintains she didn't campaign for her new job—or push Vargas out of the role, which she'd held for 17 years. “I don’t have feelings of self-righteousness, like, I’m not owed anything, but I did think I was ready for the job,” she says. “I didn’t lobby for the job…I’ve never been one to lobby for something until it’s a job up for grabs. I’ve always wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror and say, everything I did I did based on merit and something I accomplished.”
Michael Strahan, Amy Robach, David Muir, and Lara Spencer on GMA in June 2018.
Robach still appears on GMA, but every day is different. Some days, she anchors the morning show, other days she films 20/20. The split schedule still allows her to spend more time with her family.
She and husband former Melrose Place star Andrew Shue have three children at home—Annalise, 12, and Ava, 15, from Robach's first marriage, and Shue’s son from a previous marriage, Wyatt, 15, and two other sons who are in college.
“I can be there with them after school, that’s the important time. I’ve missed out on most mornings, but… they’re just like zombies getting out the door and leaving,” Robach says with a laugh. “I’m like, okay, I feel better, I didn’t miss that much. The afternoons are when they need stuff for projects and go to dance classes, and voice lessons.”
Robach and her husband Andrew Shue with their children (from left) Ava, Annalise, and Wyatt, on a family trip to Germany.
She’s been offered evening anchor positions in the past, but turned them all down. “I knew it’d mean I’d never see my kids,” she says. “That was not ever going to be okay for me… Sure every now and then I have to do a shoot at night or whatever, but it’s far and few between. When I travel they’re so proud of me, like, ‘My mom’s here, my mom’s there!’ I think they look at me and they’re proud, and...”
Robach is interrupted. Her phone’s started buzzing—it’s Annalise.
Robach and her daughter climbing Kilimanjaro.
“What’s up, honey?” she says. “Yes, I’m almost done, be there soon. Be careful!”
Annalise wants to go on a walk by herself, but Robach’s not ready to let her 12-year-old out in the city alone just quite yet. “I don’t know if I’m making the right calls, I just try to make the best judgement,” she tells me after hanging up. “With my personal life, as a mother and as a cancer thriver, I see everything as an opportunity to learn, no matter what it is. It’s an opportunity to do better, to be better. That’s how I approach my job and my storytelling, too.”
