Daniel Schorr
|
|
Daniel Schorr (born August 31, 1916 ) is a journalist who has covered the world for more than 60 years. He is now a senior news analyst for National Public Radio.
He was born on August 31, 1916 in New York City. He was the son of two Russian immigrants, but his father died when he was only six. He began his journalism career at the age of twelve, when he came upon a woman who had jumped or fallen from the roof of his apartment building. After calling the police, he phoned the Bronx Home News and was paid $5 for his information.
He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the West Bronx, where he worked on the Clinton News, the school paper. He graduated from City College of New York. In January of 1967, he married Lisbeth Bamberger, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.
In June 1957, he obtained an exclusive interview with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Communist party chief. It aired on CBS's Face the Nation. Schorr left the Soviet Union later that year. When he applied for a new visa, it was denied by the Soviets. They offered no explanation.
In January 1962, he aired the first examination of everyday life under communism in East Germany, The Land Beyond the Wall: Three Weeks in a German City, which the New York Times called a "journalistic coup". After agreeing not to foster "propaganda" for the United States, Schorr was granted the rights to conduct the interviews in the city of Rostock. By airing everyday life, Schorr painted a picture of the necessity for a Communist state to seal itself off from the west in order to survive.
Schorr attracted the anger of the Nixon White House. In 1971, after a dispute with White House aides, Schorr's friends, neighbors, and co-workers were questioned by the FBI about his habits. They were told that Schorr was under consideration for a high-level position in the environmental area. Schorr knew nothing about it. Later, during the Watergate hearings, it was revealed that Nixon aides had drawn up a list of enemies, and Daniel Schorr was on that list.
In 1980, Schorr was among the first hired by Ted Turner and Reese Schoenfeld to deliver commentary and news analysis on the fledgling Cable News Network (CNN).
In 1997, he made an unusual cameo-style appearance in the Hollywood movie The Game.
External links
- NPR's bio of Daniel Schorr (http://www.npr.org/about/people/bios/dschorr.html)
- Recent reports by Daniel Schorr (http://search1.npr.org/search97cgi/s97_cgi?CleanQuery=Daniel+Schorr&ResultTemplate=allow_re_sort.hts&SortSpec=Date+Desc+Score+Desc&ViewTemplate=docview.hts&collection=ALL02&Action=FilterSearch&filter=topic_filter.NEW.hts&QueryText=)