Daniel Schorr
July 23rd, 2010
For many years now, I’ve admired Daniel Schorr’s reporting on NPR. I could instantly recognize his voice, and perhaps to the irritation of Terah, whenever I heard him on the radio, I’d turn it up and ask that we be quiet for a couple minutes so I could listen.
The thing about Dan is that he was a reporter for 60 years. He reported from Moscow for CBS, from the Netherlands, Berlin, Washington. He interviewed Kruschev, got on Nixon’s enemies list — a fact he famously discovered as he was reading the list for the first time live on the air — and was fired from several jobs for insisting on sticking to his standards over the objections of more profit-driven executives.
The reason I listened to him was that he had a perspective nobody else does. There’d be some contemporary story, and inevitably he’d relate it to something Eisenhower said, or a G7 meeting in the Reagan years, or something Kruschev or Gorbachev mentioned. And not only was it accurate, it was incisive and enlightening.
Some things well worth reading:
- NPR’s Obituary, which includes a link to their 1-hour memorial special
- CBS Evening News story and video
- Dan Schorr interviewed by his son for StoryCorps
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