August 31: Daniel Schorr

The celebrated veteran journalist Daniel Schorr, who died in 2010 after a sixty-year career, was born in the Bronx on this date in 1916. A graduate of City College, Schorr was recruited to CBS News by Edward R. Murrow in 1953. Schorr opened a bureau in Moscow, where he gained an exclusive interview with Nikita Khrushchev on “Face the Nation” in 1957. He reported widely on the Communist bloc in the early 1960s, landed on Richard M. Nixon’s “enemies list” (which he read aloud on live television) in the early 1970s, made public the secret Pike Committee report on illegal CIA and FBI activities in 1976 (for which CBS fired him), and became the first on-camera employee of CNN when Ted Turner launched it in 1979. Schorr ended his career as senior news analyst on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” where he offered mostly liberal commentary for decades; his last offering was aired just thirteen days before his death at 93. His six books included Don’t Get Sick in America (1970), Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism (2002), and The Senate Watergate Report (2005).
“Washed away by one controversial leak too many? Undone by a reporting style that proved indigestible to a network worried about affiliates and regulations? Unable to adapt myself to corporate tugs on the reins? Unwilling to exempt my own network from my investigative reporting? All of that, I guess.” —Daniel Schorr
Watch Daniel Schorr talk with Leonard Lopate about the future of radio in an excerpt from a 2008 radio interview: