Before Peter Alexander left NBC News to headline his new show on MS NOW, the Oakland native regularly reported to work at the White House, where he covered three presidents — Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump — and the people who worked for them.
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“You know being a journalist, certainly being a White House correspondent, is not about being popular,” Alexander said. That was definitely the case covering Trump, who included Alexander in the roster of reporters he liked to berate on live TV. Alexander first became a target during a press conference in March 2020 when he asked Trump: “What would you say to Americans right now who are scared?”
In the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the death toll had climbed to 200, thousands had become sick and the president was touting unproven treatments. “We were just trying to wrap our heads around what was going on in our country and in the world,” Alexander said.
Trump, flanked by a line of officials, including future MAGA nemesis Anthony Fauci, called Alexander’s question “nasty” and declared: “I say you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say.”
But Alexander, who also co-anchored the Saturday edition of the “Today” show, never let clashes with Trump or other officials phase him, and his calm and persistence under pressure won him a number of prestigious awards over more than 20 years at NBC, including Emmys, an Edward R. Murrow Award and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Journalism.
Starting Monday, Alexander is getting his own hourlong, Monday-Friday show on the newly launched MS NOW cable channel (formerly MSNBC). The show is built around him and his long experience covering Washington. It will feature “authoritative reporting, thoughtful conversations and in-depth analysis of the biggest political and national stories shaping the day,” a statement from MS NOW said.
“State of Play” airs at 8 a.m. on the West Coast, with Alexander hoping it can be a daily, agenda-setting resource for Bay Area viewers as they start their day, “whether there’s a ton of news breaking or we can (present) our original reporting.” While based in Washington, D.C., Alexander continues to draw inspiration from “people back home” — “smart and engaged news consumers” who helped give him the savvy and confidence to ask hard questions of powerful people.
Alexander’s departure from NBC comes amid seismic shifts in the media landscape. While corporate and ideological restructuring has put prominent CBS journalists out of work, Alexander is leaving NBC on good terms. He’s looking to challenge himself “with something new, personally and professionally,” as he turns 50.
Alexander also wants more time with his family — wife, Alison Starling, and their two daughters, ages 13 and 11 — after 14 years of covering the White House. His grueling schedule included traveling with presidents to all 50 states and to nearly 60 countries. He also commuted weekly from his home in Washington, D.C., to New York City to appear on “Saturday Today.”
Alexander’s new job became possible after NBC’s parent company Comcast spun off most of its cable networks last year, including the former MSNBC, into a new company, Versant. MS NOW retained some of MSNBC’s biggest stars — including Castro Valley native Rachel Maddow and Orinda-reared Nicolle Wallace — while embracing a “startup” ethos, which Alexander said means building up the newsroom instead of letting it contract.
“I think it now has more than three dozen Pulitzer and Murrow and Emmy and Peabody award-winning journalists from places like the Washington Post and New York Times and Politico and NBC News,” Alexander said. “I’m just I’m grateful to be a part of a place that’s investing in good journalism, especially right now.”
As for whether his reporting will be guided by the known “progressive bent” of MSNBC and MS NOW, Alexander said, “I’m not an advocate for Republicans or for Democrats. I’m an advocate for the facts, and I think that’s what the audience expects of me. It’s certainly what I expect of myself.”
As Alexander explained, the professional experience that brought him to this moment goes back to becoming a news junkie while growing up with his parents, David Alexander and Terry Pink and younger sister Rebecca, near Lake Merritt.
“I grew up watching KTVU, the ’10 O’Clock News’ with Dennis Richmond, Elaine Corral, and Mark Ibanez,” Alexander said. Ibanez became an early mentor after he interviewed the station Sports Director for a paper he was writing at Head-Royce School on local sports journalists. Pretty soon, Ibanez invited Alexander to shadow him at work.
“Every Wednesday, starting before I could drive, my parents would drop me off at KTVU and I would spend those evenings helping him gather statistics and work on scripts,” Alexander said. “I was intoxicated by that energy.”
That was the start of a professional journey that “has been incredible and beyond my wildest dreams.” With a journalism degree from Northwestern University, Alexander began his rise in broadcast news, starting at local stations in Lexington, Kentucky, Spokane and Seattle before landing a job at NBC in 2004.
Now at one of the “Big 3” networks, Alexander initially focused on covering international stories, including Hurricane Ivan in Cuba, during which he interviewed Fidel Castro, and the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden. He also reported from Mexico, the Galapagos Islands, Afghanistan, and Gaza and Israel and contributed to NBC’s coverage of the summer and winter Olympics, up through the most recent winter games in Milan.
After Alexander followed 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, he was named the network’s White House correspondent. His reports regularly appeared on the “NBC Nightly News,” “Today,” “Meet the Press” and MSNBC. He occasionally took breaks from hard news to cover a more personal story that’s been featured by this news organization. His younger sister Rebecca, a psychotherapist, author and memoirist lives with Usher Syndrome, type III, a rare genetic disorder that is causing her to go blind and deaf.
In covering four administrations, Alexander said, “It was always like a bit of a pendulum from one president to the next.” George Bush “was the folksy Texan,” Barack Obama “professorial,” Trump “blunt and brash” and Biden “maybe a little bit more in between.”
Reporting on “master media manipulator” Trump became an immediate adjustment in 2017, even for seasoned reporters. “When you become a White House correspondent, there’s the expectation that you are going to be reading voraciously to keep up with these policies about challenging places around the world,” he said. “(With Trump), there’s reading 140 characters to keep up” with the “volume of events” unleashed daily by him and his administration.
Like other reporters, Alexander has witnessed a stark difference between the first Trump administration and the second.
Neither Trump nor many people who entered the White House with him in 2017 “had any expectation they would win, and they hadn’t really been preparing for that as best we could tell,” Alexander said. But Trump quickly took to lashing out at the press corps, saying that “fake anonymous sources” were behind bombshell leaks about internal deliberations and conflicts, along with concerns about his leadership. But Alexander said he was on the receiving end of calls from top Trump aides who were reaching out. “These were people in that first term really felt a need to communicate what was happening and what they were seeing,” he said.
Trump 2.0 is a much more tightly controlled operation, so there are far fewer scoops from the president’s inner circle, “where someone reveals the real story,” Alexander said. Trump also is leaning “into his instincts a lot” and has worked to undermine the press’ watchdog role by admitting sympathetic journalists, influencers and podcasters into the press corps. “On one occasion, when the president was in the briefing room, someone in the back shouted ‘Trump 2028!’” Alexander said.
And, Alexander continued to have a combative relationship with Trump, culminating in the president “laying into him for five to seven minutes” when he hosted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office in 2025. Instead of adhering to Trump’s talking point, Alexander asked the president about another controversial decision: accepting Qatar’s gift of a $400 million Boeing jet to be used as Air Force One. In his tirade, Trump called Alexander a “jerk,” “idiot” and a “disgrace.”
As usual, Alexander tried not to get ruffled, adopting the attitude: “Whether it was in the briefing room or in the Oval Office, those moments don’t reflect on me, they reflect on the other person.”
Even though he’ll no longer be ensconced in the White House, Alexander will serve as MS NOW’s chief national reporter and hopes “State of Play” will offer in-depth coverage of a president who, among other things, launched a war against Iran that has killed 18 Americans and cost nearly $40 billion in five months. “As we approach the midterms, he faces real challenges to explain the war, the impact on Americans’ wallets, to say nothing of many of the other positions that he and his administration have taken,” said Alexander.
He also wants to look toward the 2028 presidential election by interviewing potential top contenders, including Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris. “I’d like taking some of these maybe 2028 hopefuls to their hometowns,” he said. “Kamala Harris and I are both local. I’d love to walk around the streets of Oakland with her.”
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