After longtime NBC Washington anchor Pat Lawson Muse delivered her final broadcast Friday, there was a new face on the 5 a.m. news in D.C. Monday.
NBC4 Today’s new anchor Tony Perkins hit the news desk for the first time, and said that being there was a “dream come true.”
He was a former weather anchor on ABC’s Good Morning America and then was an anchor on CBS affiliate WUSA until 2020.
On Monday’s show, NBC4’s Tommy McFly interviewed Perkins about his life and how he got where he is today.
Perkins grew up in Southwest D.C. and then traveled around the Capital Beltway, graduating from Mount Vernon High School in Fairfax County, Virginia.
He went to American University and majored in communications.
When Perkins was in college, he had to interview someone he looked up to, and he picked Jim Vance, the longtime NBC Washington anchor who died in 2017. He went to his office, interviewed him and said he was a big inspiration to him.
“The thing about Jim is that he was so accessible and open and kind and it was really great. He made a big impression,” Perkins said.
One fun fact is that telling the news isn’t the only thing he does behind the microphone. Perkins was a professional comedian for about nine years.
“I traveled all over the country performing,” he said. “I was making money but I had a couple of other jobs too.”
How does comedy transition to being a newsperson?
For his first television job in D.C., Perkins said the program for channel 20 at the time saw him in a comedy club and approached him about a position.
“My son likes to say, ‘so wait a minute, you were so bad at comedy that a TV executive met you at a comedy club and said, that guy would be great doing the news?'”
