From Notable Alumni · Foundation editorial

MTV News political correspondent (2000–2007); reportage from Iraq, two presidential elections, and a music-video network's bewildered news department. Gideon Yago (CC 2000) joined MTV News on graduation and spent the next seven years bringing reportage to a cable network whose audience had not, on the whole, signed up for it. He covered the 2000 and 2004 elections, reported from Iraq during the early years of the war, and conducted political interviews (often the first the interviewees had ever given to a music channel) between music videos. His MTV work brought back a Peabody Award (2003, for the network's sexual-health campaign) and a News Emmy (2004, for Choose or Lose election programming). He has since written for Rolling Stone, GQ, and television, including co-writing an episode of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom and story credits on Narcos, Quantico, and The Mosquito Coast. The strategy of putting consequential reporting on a youth network was, at the time, considered a fool's errand; the audience that watched him grew up to dominate the political conversation that followed.