PERSON: Heidi Przybyla


Employer

Position

Journalist
Biography

In 2023, she was part of a team that won a George Polk Award and Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting for her reporting on dark money interests behind the making of the Supreme Court. The team’s work was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Prior to Politico, Przybyla was a correspondent at NBC and senior political reporter at USA TODAY, where she led coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the broader 2016 presidential field. Przybyla’s stories frequently appeared on the paper’s front page, were recognized in Washington’s leading tip sheets, including Playbook, and featured on television.

For more than a decade, she served as political, White House and congressional reporter at Bloomberg News based in Washington, where she was a regular presence on Bloomberg Television. As a White House correspondent, Przybyla covered the end of President Bill Clinton’s administration and President George W. Bush’s term, including reporting from the White House on Sept. 11, 2001 and the Pentagon on Sept. 12. She later helped lead much of the wire’s politics and policy coverage in the House and Senate during numerous budget and shutdown battles, was a contributor to BusinessWeek magazine and co-hosted a few episodes of Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect.

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Przybyla’s investigative journalism into both major political parties has been ahead of major political and policy shifts. Hours after an investigative report on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, he called a news conference reversing his decades-long position on a controversial amendment related to abortion. One day after her exclusive interview with a leading Mayo Clinic cardiologist on potential dangerous cardiac effects (including sudden death) of a Hydroxychloroquine drug combination promoted by President Trump, the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology issued a public warning.

She was first to obtain a memo to the FBI and text messages showing then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was communicating with former classmates in advance of sexual harassment claims that later became public. A 2022 investigative report on RNC poll worker recruitment in Michigan led the state to establish a “code of conduct” for poll workers. She was the first network correspondent to break, on air, the shape of the impeachment articles against President Trump. Przybyla obtained internal Dept. Of Health and Human Services communications showing the Trump Administration’s abrupt cancellation of a federal program to prevent teen pregnancy was directed by political appointees over the objections of career staff. Days later, HHS agreed to pull back its earlier decision to cancel the program outright.

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Two days after her reporting on school air safety hazards during Covid, experts advising the Biden Administration called on him to set air standards guidance.

Przybyla was the first network television correspondent granted an interview with former Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid after he left the Senate warning of Russian interference in the U.S. election.

Within Bloomberg, she was recognized for numerous scoops on budget and economic matters, including then-President Obama’s flirtation with trimming Social Security benefits. She was the first reporter, during a visit to his ranch, to question former President Bush about the now-defunct Enron energy company.

Przybyla is also a frequent public speaker both inside and outside Washington, including before journalism classes.

After the Newtown school shootings, Przybyla took the lead on coverage of the gun debate on Capitol Hill, producing numerous scoops that extended to NBC, where her autopsy of failed gun reform uncovered how even gun show owners had been silenced by the NRA.

She has covered most every presidential election since the Gore campaign in 2000 and served for several years as Bloomberg’s lead poll writer, working with L.A. Times survey industry leader Susan Pinkus to craft polling questionnaires and interpret and write results. Przybyla has reported from India, Pakistan, China, Japan, Ireland, Egypt, among other nations.

She is a Dearborn Heights, Michigan native and has a bachelor’s degree in international affairs and German from the James Madison College at Michigan State University, where she was in the honors college.

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She began her journalism career at the Washington Business Journal, where she was a National Press Foundation Fellow, winning one of two national awards to attend an annual Wharton Business Seminar for Writers. In 2019, she was among a group of NBC “road warriors” receiving a “First Amendment Award” from the Radio Televisions Digital News Association.

Przybyla lives in Virginia with her husband, two children and a fluffy shichon named Suki, which means “love” in Japanese. It derives from a favorite song of her father, whose passing early in the pandemic influenced her decision to cover federal Covid policy fulltime for NBC. The daughter of a working-class Midwestern community in Michigan, Przybyla often uses her platform to showcase similar communities afflicted by deindustrialization and political polarization.

[Https://www.heidiprzybyla.com/]
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