Mongrel much ?
December 2013
Antoine Sanfuentes, the former Washington bureau chief for NBC News, is exiting the network.
The news was confirmed in a farewell note emailed to staff by Sanfuentes Monday morning.
The journalist had been with the Peacock network for 24 years. His last day is Jan. 20, he said in the email, a copy of which was reviewed by The Post.
“We are in the midst of a remarkable time in the news business that is revolutionizing how we are informed, but that still comes with a responsibility to be competitive and to get it right,” Sanfuentes told the staff in the email.
The note did not refer to his reasons for departing but he is said to have not shared NBC News chief Deborah Turness’ vision.
The news division has been grappling with cutbacks and buy-outs and the DC staff have been particularly upset about some of the changes.
One “Meet the Press” producer, Adam Verdugo, exited the show in recent weeks.
Sanfuentes had been working from Rockefeller Center in recent months but had held a series of positions. He was named Washington bureau chief in February 2011 and had worked closely with “Meet the Press” anchor David Gregory and political news director Chuck Todd.
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Sanfuentes, 44, is a local boy all the way. He graduated from Walt Whitman High School in 1985 and attended Montgomery College for a year before transferring to American University, where he earned a degree in anthropology. While there, he interned at NBC’s Washington bureau before moving up the ranks. Today he lives in Bethesda with his wife and two daughters.
Q & A
You have an interesting background. How did that influence your pursuit of a degree in anthropology—and how did that translate into a career in television?
I grew up in a household speaking French and Spanish. My mother, who taught French, is French and Belgian, and my father was born in Paris but grew up in Chile. Until I was a teenager, we would go to France in the summers and to Chile every other year during the wintertime.
My wife worked at Fox News
I also have a ginormous exotic marine aquarium set up in the basement of my house. I run over 300 gallons of saltwater. It is a self-sustaining ecosystem which has the 180-gallon tank in the wall.
http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/Bethesda-Magazine/March-April-2012/Antoine-Sanfuentes/