This TV personality left Charlotte ‘wanting it all.’ Now at Newsmax, she says she has it.
To say Rachel Rollar’s first 10 months at the cable news channel Newsmax have not quite gone the way she’s expected them to go would be a pretty massive understatement.
In January, just over a month after joining the company at its New York City studios as co-host of the new morning show, “Wake Up America,” Rollar — who from 2015 to 2019 was a popular fixture on WCNC-TV’s morning show “Wake Up Charlotte” — contracted COVID.
And then in February...
“Well, this is a tricky story,” she says, laughing.
“I thought I was having lingering effects of COVID. I had heard about people having different issues, forms of long COVID, and I finally went to a doctor. I walked into a walk-in clinic in the Upper West Side, and I said, ‘I think I have some serious issues, and I need your help. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My stomach hurts, and this, this and this.
“I’ll never forget that nurse. She looked at me, she held my hand ... and she said, ‘Honey, you are so pregnant.’ I was like (pauses), ‘Come again?’”
In fact, she was roughly 4-1/2 months pregnant at the time.
“I was so in the grind of starting a new job, my husband and I had just moved across the country, then there was a blizzard, then we got COVID — so much was going on that I had no idea.”
After wrapping “Wake Up America” on the morning of June 18, Rollar went on maternity leave. Two days later, on the first day of summer, she and her husband Jonathan Stevens welcomed their first child — a little girl named Summer Rae.
Rollar returned to the studio to pick up where she left off with her co-host, Rob Finnerty, on Sept. 15.
And it’s now official, the 31-year-old broadcaster told the Observer during a recent Zoom interview: She has never been happier.
‘Well, I’m gonna change that’
When Rollar was growing up in South Florida, her parents never watched the news when she and her brother were around.
“I remember asking my parents, ‘Why is it that you never have the news on?’” she recalls, “and they said, ‘We don’t want to start or end our day with such negativity.’ At the time there was so much negativity in the news, and it was almost frightening viewing — you know, scaring you into watching a lot of times. And I remember thinking, as a high schooler, Well, I’m gonna change that.”
She enrolled at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., but later transferred to Florida State, ultimately graduating from FSU in 2012 with a degree in journalism and media communications.
In her first job — as a reporter for KETK-TV, the NBC affiliate in Tyler, Texas — Rollar leaned into her efforts to change the minds of people like her parents: “I wanted to tell positive stories. ... I wanted to give (a voice to) people that were trying to do better in the world.”
She took on grueling assignments, like embedding with the National Guard in LaPlace, La., as troops carried out rescue efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac in 2012, but she also kept things light by covering entertainment stories she would pitch to her bosses.
In 2015, Rollar made the leap to the much-larger market of Charlotte, where for the majority of her 4-1/2-year run on WCNC News Channel 36 she went to bed at 6:30 p.m. and woke up at 2 a.m. to help anchor the weekday morning show with Ben Thompson, Carolyn Bruck and Larry Sprinkle.
Here, she developed into a fixture on the Carolina Panthers beat with feature stories that went beyond the game, including an emphasis on the tailgating beat; she also continued gravitating toward entertainment topics, delivering breezy celebrity gossip reports and celebrity interviews.
But after marrying Stevens in 2018, the schedule began to wear on her.
“Do you feel like you’re actually living your life?” Rollar distinctly recalls asking him one day. What she meant, she says, is that “we worked opposite schedules. ... My husband and I kind of just passed throughout the week, then on the weekends we would see each other. And that just wasn’t enough time. I mean ... I wanted it all. I wanted the career and the marriage and the family, and I wanted to figure out somehow to get it all.”
So on June 28, 2019, with Sprinkle praising her “positive attitude,” “beautiful smile” and “enthusiasm,” Rollar tearfully bid farewell to WCNC viewers and headed west.
How COVID altered the plan
Rollar and Stevens, a chiropractor, moved to Los Angeles, in large part in the hopes that she would be able to dabble further in entertainment journalism.
She hit the ground running by covering a red-carpet movie premiere event for the entertainment TV show “Extra” in July 2019, but after COVID struck in March 2020, she says, “the entertainment industry was basically at a standstill. Everyone they did have was working from home. There were no red-carpet events to go to, there were no award ceremonies, there were no new movies coming out, so that came to a big standstill.”
Instead, Rollar kept busy by dabbling in sales and marketing work for her father’s business, a wholesale distribution company that supplies the travel and leisure industry; by enjoying more quality time with her husband than ever before; and by doing something she never did at home as a kid:
“I watched so much news during 2020,” Rollar says, “and I got so discouraged by everything I was seeing. There was so much heartbreak across the country, so much frustration, and such high temperature. People were so angry. I kind of just reevaluated what I wanted to do.”
Then, in the fall, Newsmax came calling.
‘I wanted to be an unbiased journalist’
Rollar was brought into the fold right when the network was celebrating its emergence as an up-and-coming player in the cable-news biz.
Just over a week before Rollar started working there, in late November of last year, the New York Times published an article about Newsmax’s meteoric rise in the wake of the 2020 election that saw Joe Biden defeat the incumbent, Donald Trump.
A headline on the Times story touted: “A once-niche conservative cable network, owned by a longtime friend of the president, lures audiences by refusing to declare an electoral winner.” The author noted in the story that those claims helped grow the audience for the Christopher Ruddy-owned network’s top show from 58,000 viewers to more than 1 million practically overnight.
Newsmax continued making news into 2021, first settling a defamation suit brought by a Dominion Voting Systems executive with an apology and an admission that allegations of voter fraud that it aired were untrue in April; but then in August, Dominion as a company filed a defamation suit.
When the topic of cable news network political leanings is broached, and how such perceptions may have weighed into her decision to join Newsmax, Rollar says: “I wanted to be an unbiased journalist. I wanted to be down the middle. I wanted to be able to pose questions to a guest or during an interview that was on both sides, and not get berated with an answer. ...
“That was a big part of my conversation when I was talking to a lot of different places (about) different job opportunities. ... And when I talked to my bosses here at Newsmax, I said that. I said, ‘If this is something that we can do together, and I can be unbiased, and I can be a down-the-middle journalist, and pose both sides, and give a viewer at home who maybe won’t get that on a different network, then I’ll do it.’”
Rollar says Newsmax agreed to her request, and has lived up to its end of the deal.
Staying focused on the positive
“It’s been a ride,” she says, describing her life since taking the new job.
“I was ... getting into the groove and then cut out for maternity leave, and now I’m back to driving my co-host Rob Finnerty insane again,” she says. “He’s been super-fun to work with, and a lot of times we laugh with each other, because we’ll say, ‘You know, we don’t agree on a lot, but that’s what makes it enjoyable’ — and that’s what I think is normal.
“But we’ve gotten to (where there’s) a line in the sand, which I think is so hard for Americans. Because I think as humans we’re not that divisive. I personally think, deep down at our core, we crave connection, and we want to have community. It’s gotten so hard over the past year or 18 months ... to have that.”
To that end, Rollar says, she is still trying to accentuate the positive as often as she can on “Wake Up America” — a program that, for what it’s worth, does get watched in her parents’ household.
As for her work-life balance, she says it’s better than ever.
She gets to sleep in (yes, the difference between a 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. wake-up call is huge). She can head home not long after the show ends at 9 a.m. to be there for Summer Rae and her “older brother,” Rollar’s beloved Yorkshire terrier Mr. Caldwell. She doesn’t have to go to bed when her husband is eating dinner.
“I finally feel like I got it all,” Rollar says, her voice shaking with emotion, “and I pinch myself all the time. I really do. I’m so grateful. Because I know it’s so rare in this business — and in any business right now. So many people are having so many struggles, whether it’s family, whether it’s infertility, whether it’s losing a job, whether it’s getting sick. We’ve never realized how important health is.”
“There’s a lot of things in the world right now that can steal your joy away,” she says.
“But there’s a lot of things that can exude it.”
This story was originally published October 4, 2021 at 4:01 PM with the headline "This TV personality left Charlotte ‘wanting it all.’ Now at Newsmax, she says she has it.."
