‘PBS NewsHour’ Reporter Attacked on NYC Subway

PBS NewsHour’s Jane Ferguson says she was the victim of a random subway attack. The journalist tweeted a detailed report of the account, alleging that she was punched in the face by a stranger on a packed subway car during the evening rush hour in Manhattan earlier this week. Ferguson was riding a 4 train when a man randomly hit her the side of her face around 6:30 p.m. “A man walked up to me in a busy rush-hour car and punched me, hard, on the side of the face,” she wrote on Twitter. “I kneeled down on the floor in shock, and steadied myself, unsure what had just happened, my ear ringing and face on fire.”

She took to the social media platform to tweet about the attack as a way to thank another stranger for helping her. “The reason I’m tweeting this is, as I knelt on the floor, I felt an arm around my shoulder, and a woman pulled me away,” Ferguson said. “The young woman took me off the car at the next stop and to the police there at grand central station before giving me a hug and making sure I got home ok.”

Ferguson was only able to collect the good Samaratain’s first name, Samantha. The whole ordeal left her in shock. “So Samantha who was on the number 4 express train between 59th st and grand central today at rush hour – thank you,” she tweeted. “New Yorkers are pretty great.”

Crimes as such are not atypical in New York. However, the New York Post claims that Mayor Eric Adams’ decision to flood the system with cops has decreased similar incidents. Train crimes are reportedly down 21.5% year to date.

Aside from being a correspondent on PBS NewsHour, Furgeson has also contributed to The New Yorker. She’s won several awards, including a 2019 Emmy Award, a 2019 and a George Polk Award, as well as a 2020 Peabody, to name a few.