Tara Peterman is an Executive Producer in News and Current Affairs at RTÉ Television in Dublin, Ireland.
She started her career in journalism as the Washington correspondent for The Irish Voice newspaper, covering immigration issues and the Clinton administration’s involvement in the Irish peace process. She later became the U.S. producer for Sky News, the British 24-hour news channel, and she was directly involved in covering the most important breaking news events of the time, including the Clinton impeachment drama, gun violence, hurricanes and the contested election of George W. Bush.
In 2000 Tara moved to Dublin, a city she knew well from studying abroad at CUA, with her husband, then a television reporter. After freelancing for U.S. and international media organizations Tara became a producer, then Executive Producer on RTÉ’s “Prime Time”, the country’s top current affairs show. Tara has overseen or directly produced hundreds of hours of live and scripted reports, studio shows and investigative documentaries. She has won two Irish Justice Media Awards and a Medical Media Award, and has twice been a New York Film and Television Awards finalist for investigative documentaries. Tara has covered Irish and European elections and every U.S. presidential election since 2000.
In October 2016 Tara and her team spent time on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border witnessing first-hand the economic and immigration issues that had become central to Donald Trump’s election. She filmed with U.S. Border Patrol Agents along “the wall” in Nogales, AZ and with the deported in Nogales, Sonora. She has also documented the lives of Irish immigrants who have overstayed their U.S. visas and who are now living life in the shadows in Boston, wondering whether they’ll be sent back to Ireland.
Working in journalism brings her right back to her love of history. She says, “I am regularly reminded that I am witnessing and recording moments that have the power to change the world or our world view. While a degree in history won’t deliver a specific job or career, the training has provided me with the necessary elements for a career in journalism, ‘the first rough draft of history’. Journalism and history both require research, critical thinking, fact checking, the desire and ability to see multiple sides of a story and the discipline of coherent storytelling.”
Returning to Catholic University a few years ago really felt like a homecoming for Tara. Meeting up with old friends (many of them history graduates), she had the opportunity to reminisce, walking by Mullen Library and around the beautiful Gibbons Hall where she had attended so many classes. “CUA’s history program challenged me in ways I now appreciate. I still remember this stinging criticism – ‘your writing does not do your thoughts justice’ – from one of my favorite professors, written across the top of an early history paper.” The remark forced her to work harder and to edit more carefully. It turned out to be an influential comment in her academic career, one which she still recalls from time to time in her professional life.
Tara found Catholic University’s history department to be “filled with passionate, intelligent people who were like-minded in their love of history and their desire to be engaged in things political, legal and media-related, and professors who cared deeply about what and whom they were teaching.”