Journalism Career

Before stepping into the world of broadcast journalism, she was working in print journalism. One of her biggest jobs was reporting for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Before Cecilia joined ABC News, she was working at the KGO-TV station in San Francisco. She covered a large number of stories in the area for over three years when she worked for the station.

She started to work at ABC News in 2011 as a correspondent based in Los Angeles. From the first day she joined ABC News, she was able to cover many stories including domestic and interational stories. Some of the assignments she worked on included Japan where she was covering the Fukushima power plant incident, the selection of Pope in Rome, and the Olympics in London. She was able to go to the Arctic’s bottom in a submarine while she encountered whales in Gulf of California. She interviewed leading newsmakers such as Enrique Pena Nieto, the President of Mexico and also high profile celebrites like Sylvester Stallone. She was the one that got a chance to  cover the inauguration of President Barrack Obama for ABC News. Other stories that she covered included the Ebola outbreak case in USA, Sony falling prey to computer Hacking, allegations against Bill Cosby and the midterm election of 2014.

She is now a senior national correspondent and she works together with Tom Llamas for the weekend editions for ABC World News Tonight.

Hurricane Katrina Controversy

In a story she wrote for the San Francisco Gate, Cecilia spoke about how the US army was trying prevent the media from reporting on the dead victims of Hurricane Katina “A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans' Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter. Recovery team members wearing white protective suits and black boots stopped at houses with spray painted markings on the doors designating there were dead bodies inside. Outside one house on Kentucky Street, a member of the Army 82nd Airborne Division summoned a reporter and photographer standing nearby and told them that if they took pictures or wrote a story about the body recovery process, he would take away their press credentials and kick them out of the state.”

In 2005, CNN had taken the Bush Adminstration to court and made them agree that they would not prevent the media for reporting on efforts to recover bodies during Hurricane Katrina. Cecilia uncovered the fact that the government was not keeping their promise, “But on Monday, in the Bywater district, that assurance wasn't being followed. The 82nd Airborne soldier told reporters the Army had a policy that requires media to be 300 meters -- more than three football fields in length -- away from the scene of body recoveries in New Orleans. If reporters wrote stories or took pictures of body recoveries, they would be reported and face consequences, he said, including a loss of access for up-close coverage of certain military operations. Later Monday, the recovery team collected a body from a green house on St. Anthony Street in nearby Seventh Ward. The dead man, who was slipped into a black body bag and carried out to one of the white vans, had been lying alone on the living room floor for nearly two weeks, neighbors said.”