Daniel Schorr Dies

Daniel Schorr, the legendary foreign correspondent for Edward R. Murrow’s CBS News, the New York Times, the then-brand-new cable network CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, and finally NPR, died at 93.

Throughout his career, whether he was reopening CBS’s Moscow bureau, reporting on the construction of the Berlin Wall, or leaking news of illegal CIA-sponsored assassinations to the Village Voice (after CBS had taken him off the air), he embodied journalism’s central tenet: “Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable”—emphasis on the second half. He made Nixon’s Enemies List (and that was before the Voice leak), which he said he considered a greater honor than winning multiple Emmys. In a memoir, he attributed his outsider mentality to growing up in the Bronx “poor, fat, Jewish, fatherless.”

In addition to the Times obit—which reports that he long believed he was turned down a job there because “the paper was concerned that too many Jewish bylines might jeopardize its coverage of the Mideast”—NPR, which announced his death, has a great write-up.

Journalism Legend Daniel Schorr Dies at 93 [NPR]
Daniel Schorr, Journalist, Dies at 93 [NYT]