Ed Bradley, the most prominent African-American in television journalism, died Thursday in New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital at age 65.
The longtime CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent had battled leukemia but continued to work after undergoing heart surgery last year.
Bradley won 19 news Emmy Awards over a career that spanned topics from the Vietnam War and the White House to celebrity interviews. He recently was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
More than his formal awards, Bradley will be remembered as the embodiment of “hip” to a generation of younger journalists. The sight of Bradley carrying Vietnamese boat people ashore in a documentary, interviewing Lena Horne on “60 Minutes” and reporting from political conventions through the years is indelible.
“He was doing pioneering work, long-form journalism on ’60 Minutes’ in an era when it was hard to find anybody of color on the air at the network level,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Washington, D.C.- based Project for Excellence in Journalism. “…He was cool in the cultural sense and yet compassionate and natural in the human sense, and he broadened the definition of what was a story in network TV without cheapening things.”
Born in Philadelphia, Bradley graduated from Cheyney (Pa.) State College in 1964. After briefly working as a teacher, he moved on to journalism.
He stood out as the younger, jazz-loving, earring-wearing member of the more staid “60 Minutes” team.
“We have lost one of America’s best,” Dan Rather said in a statement. “As a compassionate, sensitive person, as a gentle but strong man, as a lover of life and a great professional, he was an example of all a conscientious and dedicated journalist can be.”
Bradley’s introduction to news reporting came during the Philadelphia riots in the 1960s. In 1967, he landed a job with WCBS radio in New York, where he reported news and spun jazz records.
After a stint in Paris, he became a stringer for CBS News. In 1972, he was transferred to the CBS Saigon bureau. While reporting in Cambodia, he was wounded by a mortar round.
After the war, he moved to the network’s Washington bureau. He covered the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign for CBS in 1976 and became CBS News’ White House correspondent until 1978. He became principal correspondent for the documentary series “CBS Reports” and succeeded Dan Rather on “60 Minutes” in 1981.
Among his journalistic coups was a report on the Columbine High School massacre, revealing that authorities had ignored warnings about the shooters. One of his last “60 Minutes” reports broke ground in interviews with the accused in the Duke University lacrosse rape case.
Bradley once told a newspaper interviewer, “In my obit, I hope they’ll mention a documentary on being black in America, ‘With All Deliberate Speed?”‘ That 1979 segment of “CBS Reports” was an in-depth examination of African-American progress, or lack thereof, since the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
