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AAPRC’s Global Communicator: Ed Bradley

Ed Bradley
CBS News Correspondent
“60 Minutes”
New York NY

Had it not been for a fortuitous detour, things may have turned out very differently for veteran newsman Ed Bradley. Instead of stepping into America’s living rooms every Sunday night via the long-running news magazine show 60 Minutes, he’d be stepping into an elementary school classroom. Great for the kids, not so great for the rest of us.

Bradley earned a degree in education from Pennsylvania’s Bradley State College in 1964, but during his senior year he was introduced to radio. A speaker from a local radio station –– Philadelphia’s WDAS–– visited the school urging the senior class to use community resources to reach out to young people. Bradley wrangled a tour of the station for himself and soon after the young teacher was spending his days in the classroom and evenings at the studio. He started off working for free before being hired to read news and play music. The station’s jazz DJ was a guiding influence. “My mentor Del Shields always pushed me towards news, and said I had more of a future in news then there was in being a jazz disc jockey,” says Bradley. “And I’m forever grateful to him.”

By 1968, Bradley knew teaching wasn’t for him and started applying for jobs in broadcasting. He landed at New York’s WCBS, one of just three Black people on staff (the other two were, reportedly, a radio technician and a janitor).

In 1971, Bradley moved to Paris and lived off his savings. When the money ran out he joined CBS News’ Paris Bureau as a stringer. By 1972, he’d been transferred to Saigon and after a year was promoted to correspondent. He went back to the States after being wounded while on assignment in Cambodia, but in March of 1975 he volunteered to return to Indochina where he covered Vietnam. His work from Cambodia garnered a George Polk Award in journalism as well a DuPont Citation.

Back stateside in 1976, he covered Jimmy Carter’s campaign for President and began a 20-year stint covering the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He served as CBS’ White House correspondent from 1976-78 and was also anchor of the CBS Sunday Night News from 1976-81.

In 1981, 60 Minutes correspondent Dan Rather was tapped to replace Walter Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Bradley took Rather’s spot at the prestigious news magazine. Twenty-five years and 19 Emmy Awards later, it’s obvious that 60 Minutes and Ed Bradley are a perfect fit. His body of work over the past two-plus decades has touched every facet of contemporary life, from the arts (Lena Horne) to race (the reopening of the Emmett Till case) to terrorism (the only television interview with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh).

Three of Bradley’s recent Emmy Awards came in 2003, when he was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Emmy, an Emmy for his 60 Minutes report on brain cancer patients (“A New Lease on Life”), and another for his hour-long report on 60 Minutes II about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church (”The Catholic Church on Trial”).

Bradley’s work has not only earned him the admiration of his peers, but has also spurred important change. “Death by Denial,” the 2000 report that focused on the plight of Africans dying of AIDS, won a Peabody Award and helped convince drug companies to donate and discount AIDS drugs. “Unsafe Haven” prompted a federal investigation into the nation’s largest chain of psychiatric hospitals.

After all the years and stories, Bradley’s passion for news and for the work he does for 60 Minutes hasn’t diminished. “When I was a school teacher, I learned very early on that I wasn’t fit to be in the classroom,” he says of his affinity for the news magazine. “I didn’t like to be confined to one place…When I was at the White House, covering the Carter White House, I didn’t like it because I was at the same place every day doing the same thing. I [find] that at 60 Minutes I get to go out and do stories in different places about different subjects with different people all the time.”

“I am going from yesterday, shooting a story on the Counterterrorism Unit in New York City, to being able to do a story in a couple of weeks on Tiger Woods. To be doing a story…on Project Bioshield, which is a program that was created by the President and Congress to create a bio defense industry so drug companies would come up with products to protect all of us in the event of an anthrax attack or radiation syndrome from nuclear attack. And it’s not working. That’s something very important to bring to the American people. You have that variety, and that variety is what really makes my life so enjoyable.”

Well-known as a patron of music (especially jazz) and the arts, Bradley serves on the boards of numerous arts organizations. He also hosts the Peabody Award Winning radio series Jazz at Lincoln Center with Ed Bradley.

He lives in New York with his wife, Patricia Blanchett, and enjoys travel, skiing and reading.

When you started your career at WCBS Radio in the late 1960s you were the only African-American on the air. How did race impact your work life during those early years?

It was interesting. Professionally, I had to make a point with the assignment editor of not being automatically assigned to Black stories. I found that they would make assignments in the beginning of the day for which reporters covered which stories. If there was a “Black” story, then it automatically came to me. I finally had a showdown with him and said, look, I didn’t come here to be a Black reporter. I want to cover all news in this city. I don’t want to be relegated to one thing. I don’t knock that. There are some people who chose to do that and if that had been my choice I don’t think I would ever have gone to Paris to work. I would have never gone to Vietnam. I would have never been at CBS Reports or 60 Minutes. I had to take a stand and say hey, I want to be treated like every reporter here. Eventually that’s what happened. But I also saw stories that involved people of color where I said, hey, I want to cover that story because I knew it wouldn’t get covered if I didn’t.

You’ve spent a significant amount of time visiting the city of New Orleans (particularly as a serious jazz lover). How have the events around Hurricane Katrina impacted you personally?

Well, it’s sad. I’ve been going to New Orleans for almost 30 years. I have a lot of friends in New Orleans, and at one time had a business in New Orleans. I, as President Clinton would say, “feel your pain.” I felt the pain of many of my friends who lost everything. They’re people who’ve given so much to me, to all of us, musically, who were just wiped out. I’ve been very active in trying to raise funds and to raise consciousness so people don’t forget New Orleans. This year at Christmas my wife and I decided to forgo Christmas gifts. For people we normally give gifts to, we gave donations in their name to specific musicians and other people we know in New Orleans who lost everything. For us it was one of the best Christmases ever, because it truly was the gift of giving.

You covered the Vietnam War in the 1970s. When you look at war coverage then and now, what’s your gut response to the work coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan? To the way embedding works?

It’s very different. When I was in Vietnam and Cambodia, you could go anywhere you wanted. You can’t do that today. You can go anywhere you want to in Iraq, but you run the risk of being killed or kidnapped. You ran the risk of being killed in Vietnam and Cambodia, but it was different. You knew where the threat was. You knew: if I go down that road, that’s where the fighting is. I know how close I can get to that fighting. In Iraq it’s anywhere and everywhere. It’s very different. You have a lot of people who are living in the green zone and covering the war from the green zone. I don’t say that as a knock against them. They’re there and I’m not. But it sort of limits what it is that you’re able to do in covering war. [Embedding] is better than nothing. I think it’s better than not being able to cover the war, but I think it’s fraught with all kinds of problems.

Do you feel as though the jailing of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller was a significant blow to journalists’ first amendment protection?

I don’t think so, because I don’t know why Judith Miller was in jail. I think Judith Miller can blame Judith Miller for being in jail. She had an opportunity to, as I understand it, identify her source. [She] got permission from the source to identify him, and instead she chose to go to jail and at the end of that period to identify him –– after he reassured her that, yes, you can…So why did she go to jail? That, I don’t quite understand.

You’ve done countless interviews over the course of your career. Are there any people whose stories have been particularly unforgettable?

It was over 20 years ago, but it was an interview with a kid, I guess he was about 15 years old at the time, who shot his father to death with a shotgun because he got tired of seeing his mother physically abused and his sister physically and sexually abused. He just had too much. I remember talking to this kid and asking him a question and it would be perhaps a minute before he started to answer. It was clear that what he had done had a tremendous impact on him and it wasn’t that one day he just responded to something and snapped. He thought about this for a long time and decided that this was the only way he could resolve it. That’s just always stayed with me.

You’ve recently celebrated 25 years at 60 Minutes. Is there any work that you’re especially proud of?

There’s a lot of work that I’m proud of…but I’ve always said that if there is such a thing and I got to the pearly gates and St. Peter asked what have you done to deserve entry, I’d ask him if he’d seen my Lena Horne story. It was a profile of Lena Horne that I did my first year at 60 Minutes and I don’t think I’ve done a better one. I did a story a couple years ago about a woman named Alice Coles in a little town in a forgotten part of Virginia, who totally changed her community through her will power and the organizational skills that she had and she learned. She was able to get people who were living in tarpaper shacks into new, modern housing. I just thought she was amazing.

Is there a newsmaker who’s been elusive that you still hope to interview?

There’s one I’ve been trying to do for 10 years, well almost 10 years, and that’s Tiger Woods. And it’s about to happen, so I feel pretty good about that.

Is there a place where your love of art and music and your career in journalism intersect?

I think one is when I serve on the boards of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Rhythm and Blues Foundation because essentially I’m there because of what I’ve achieved professionally. And I’m able to make a contribution because of what I’ve achieved professionally. So that’s one area. Another is when I get to do profiles of people in the arts whom I admire. They may be popular musicians or people who are not so popular who most people would never know of, like Thomas Quasthoff, who was a thalidomide child and as a grown man now comes up to my waist and has those little arms that are in some ways like flippers, but has the most magnificent basso profundo voice. That was a very satisfying story where my love of music and journalism intersected perfectly.

What advice do you have for young African-American journalists?

I would give them the same advice I would give to any journalist or to anyone in any profession: that there are a certain number of things that go into being successful. The first is to be prepared, to do your homework. My theory is I’d rather be over prepared than under prepared. Two: hard work. I put a lot into what it is that I do. There is a lot of hard work in being prepared to do a story. Essentially, you have to become an expert for a week on whatever it is that you’re working on. Three: I would say good luck or good fortune and being able to recognize it, not being afraid to take a chance. I’ve always found that the harder I worked the better my luck was.

Tell us one thing people would be surprised to know about you.

A lot of people would assume that because I do a lot of issue-oriented stories that often take on governmental figures, that I’m a liberal. I think people would be surprised to find there are areas in my life where I’m really conservative. I’m a social liberal, but I’m really a fiscal conservative. I think that comes from my parents…I was raised in a single-parent household –– although I did visit my father. I can remember my mother. She didn’t get paid by check, she got paid in cash, and she would put so much [cash] in these envelopes she had for insurance, for gas, for electric, so that by the end of the month she had enough in those envelopes to pay her bills. That just left a lasting impression.

AAPRC’s Mission
The African-American Public Relations Collective (AAPRC) is an assemblage of professionals who provide communication conduits among clients, journalists, media and our communities. We come together as a collective because we recognize the importance of building those same conduits amongst ourselves.

A great deal of what we do is professional development––updating our skills, keeping pace with technology, refining and streamlining processes, providing a forum to tackle the issues that impact our work environment––but we believe our professional lives benefit most from the forging of effective alliances. Connected to one another, we possess the power of a nationwide body of committed, knowledgeable practitioners with an eye on the future.

As we move into the 21st century at lightning speed, mass media and its potent messages occupy an ever-larger part of our daily lives and our collective psyche. The AAPRC is focused on helping our members gain a deeper understanding of media’s force and supporting their growth as powerful participants in the global communications network.

AAPRC’s Contact
GQ Media & Public Relations
1650 Broadway Suite 1011
New York NY 10019
1212 765 7910
1212 765 7905
aapublicistcoll@aol.com

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By Gwendolyn Quinn on 3/17/2006[read on] [11 comments]

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