What Is Brit Hume's Net Worth and Salary?
Brit Hume is an American news anchor and author who has a net worth of $14 million. At his peak, Brit Hume's salary was $5 million per year. Hume began his professional career immediately after college, working for such publications as "The Hartford Times" and the "Baltimore Evening Sun." He also worked for United Press International. In the early '70s, Brit worked for columnists Jack Anderson and Richard Pollack. Some of his reporting led to his family being put under surveillance by the Nixon administration. The surveillance footage and accompanying documents were later revealed.
Hume was hired by ABC News in 1973 and became a correspondent three years later. He became ABC's White House correspondent in 1989 and the managing editor of Washington news for Fox News in 1996. He was one of the first reporters to cover the Monica Lewinsky scandal when Fox decided to push the launch of his news program, "Special Report with Brit Hume" up in order to cover the debacle. He retired from "Special Report with Brit Hume" in 2008, then he served as a political analyst on "Fox News Sunday," hosted "On the Record," and participated in the network's election night coverage of the 2020 Presidential election. Brit has also published the books "Death and the Mines – Rebellion and Murder in the United Mine Workers" (1971) and "Inside Story" (1974).
Early Life
Brit Hume was born Alexander Britton Hume on June 22, 1943, in Washington, D.C. He is the son of Virginia Powell Minnigerode and George Graham Hume. On his father's side, Brit is a descendant of George Home, who was a son of the 10th Baron of Wedderburn, Scotland. Hume studied at St. Albans School, where Al Gore was one of his classmates, then he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Virginia in 1965.
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Career
After working for the newspaper company "The Hartford Times," Brit took jobs with United Press International and the "Baltimore Evening Sun" newspaper. From 1970 to 1972, he worked for columnist Jack Anderson. During this period, Hume published his first book, 1971's "Death and the Mines – Rebellion and Murder in the United Mine Workers," and he followed it with "Inside Story" in 1974. Jack Anderson had a column called "Washington Merry-Go-Round," and Brit reported a story for it about the Department of Justice (under President Richard Nixon) settling an antitrust case against ITT Corporation after ITT donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the 1972 Republican National Convention. After Anderson published classified documents that showed the Nixon administration's favoritism toward Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 (which was contradictory to its public pronouncements), Anderson and Hume were briefly put under CIA surveillance in 1972. The following year, Brit became "MORE" magazine's Washington editor, and he began working as a consultant for ABC News. In 1976, ABC News hired him as a correspondent, and he spent the next 11 years covering the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
Hume also reported on the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale (1984) and George H. W. Bush (1988), and beginning in 1989, he covered the administrations of President Bush and President Bill Clinton as ABC's chief White House correspondent. In 1996, Brit joined Fox News, where his wife had recently been hired as chief of the Washington bureau. He initially worked as the network's Washington managing editor, and in 1998, he began hosting "Special Report with Brit Hume," which was the #1 6:00 p.m. cable news program in the Eastern timeslot for many years. He retired from the show in 2008, but he remained with the network as panelist for "Fox News Sunday" and a senior political analyst. In 2016, he hosted "On the Record" after longtime anchor Greta Van Susteren left Fox News.
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Personal Life
Brit married Clare Jacobs Stoner on February 10, 1965, and they welcomed two children together before divorcing. Their son, Sandy, worked as a reporter for "The Hill" newspaper and broke the story of the failed attempt by Rep. Bill Paxon, a Republican representative from New York, to replace Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. In February 2008, Sandy was arrested for DUI and subsequently attempted to hang himself with a shoelace in a holding cell. After being evaluated at the D.C. Commission on Mental Health's Emergency Psychiatric Response Division, Sandy was deemed to be no longer suicidal and was released. After returning home later that day, Sandy died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The National Press Club created the Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism in his honor. Brit has said that in the aftermath of Sandy's suicide, "I came to Christ in a way that was very meaningful to me." Hume's daughter, Virginia, contributed to "The Weekly Standard" and spent 25 years working in public relations, marketing, and political communications. In 1996, she worked for the Republican National Committee as a deputy press secretary. Brit has been married to Kim Schiller since July 1993. Schiller served as Washington bureau chief and vice president of Fox News before her 2006 retirement.
Awards and Honors
In 1980, the documentary "The Killing Ground," which Hume co-wrote and narrated, earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary, Features. In 1991, he won an Emmy for his Gulf War coverage, and in 2003, he received the Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. Brit has won the "American Journalism Review" Best in the Business award twice for his White House coverage. In 2023, he was honored with the Media Research Center's MRC Bulldog Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Real Estate
In 2012, Hume paid $1.7 million for a 2,100 square foot condo in Arlington, Virginia. He sold the three-bedroom, three-bathroom home for the same price in 2021. The home features a terrace overlooking the Potomac River. In 2014, Brit put his home near Hume, Virginia, on the market for $1.9 million. He later took it off the market, then relisted it in August 2018 with an asking price of $1.49 million, and it sold for $1.35 million two months later. Built in 2001, the four-bedroom home sits on 72 acres, and the property includes two ponds.
