televison news anchorperson; journalist
Personal Information
Born on May 22, 1940, in Chicago, IL; son of Edgar (a railroad man and house painter) and Camilia (a housekeeper) Shaw; married Linda Allston, 1973; children: Amar Edgar, Anil Louise.
Education: University of Illinois, 1963-66.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1959-63.
Memberships: Society of Professional Journalists (fellow); National Press Club; Sigma Delta Chi.
Career
Reporter, correspondent, and news anchor. WYNR/WNUS all-news radio, Chicago, IL, reporter and anchor, 1964-66; Westinghouse Broadcasting Company's Group W, Chicago, reporter, 1966-68, White House correspondent, 1968-71; Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS-TV), reporter for Washington bureau, 1971-74, correspondent, 1974-77; American Broadcasting Companies (ABC-TV), Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, 1977-79, senior Capitol Hill correspondent; Cable News Network (CNN), Washington D.C., news anchor, 1980-2001.
Life's Work
Television news anchor Bernard Shaw's dispassionate manner, steady gaze, rich baritone voice, and crisply precise delivery virtually blend into the fabric of the news. In his twenty years as Cable News Network's (CNN) principal Washington anchor, he has taken a serious approach to journalism and has been widely regarded for his belief that the messenger should not get in the way of the message. Before joining CNN, Shaw worked for two of the three national television networks, CBS and ABC. In a career spanning three decades, he has covered some of modern history's most dramatic events: Watergate, the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, China's Tiananmen Square student massacre, and American involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Widely regarded as the nation's most powerful black television journalist, Shaw, retired from CNN in 2001 in order to pursue his interest in writing.
Shaw grew up during the years of World War II, the emergence of television, and the days that begat the baby boom. His father was a house painter, his mother cleaned other people's homes, and they lived on the South Side of Chicago. But far from being isolated in the "wrong" part of town and at the wrong end of the economic spectrum, the family brought the world into their home. "In those days," Shaw told Parade Magazine, "Chicago had four papers and we got all four every day." Even in his teens, Shaw had an obsessive interest in the news. "My ritual on Sunday morning was to walk to a place called the Green Door bookstore near the University of Chicago, which was the closest place I could find the Sunday New York Times," Shaw told New York magazine. Fourteen years old, paper cradled in his arms, the boy would plant himself in a coffee shop and read the paper all the way through.
But Shaw was not merely a spectator. He made announcements on the school public address system, participated in radio amateur hours, and, while some teenagers of the 1950s may have been totally absorbed in the birth of rock 'n roll, Shaw found time to dial up newspaper and broadcast reporters and pepper them with questions about story preparation and deadline pressures. Even in his youth, Shaw's tastes in television programming ran toward the news and information genre: he used to watch the television news program Meet the Press religiously, and his hero was legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow. At 16, he personally witnessed his second Democratic convention--he had managed to engineer his way into both the 1952 and 1956 conventions. Shaw told Time: "When I looked up at the anchor booths, I knew I was looking at the altar."
Met Journalistic Idol
On the road to the "altar," Shaw wangled another opportunity to speak to a journalist about his craft. It was 1961, the beginning of an era of political tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Shaw was a 21-year-old corporal in the Marines stationed in Hawaii at the time, and Walter Cronkite, his other hero, was passing through. With the tenacity of youth--or perhaps that of a budding reporter--the corporal rang Cronkite's room a total of 34 times. "He was the most persistent guy I've ever met in my life," Cronkite said in the Washington Post, "I was going to give him five begrudging minutes and ended up talking to him for a half hour. He was just determined to be a journalist." The two have been friends ever since.
In 1963, with four years of the marines behind him, and a new sense of maturity, Shaw entered the University of Illinois, choosing history as his major. His career in journalism officially began just a year later when he joined Chicago's WNUS, one of the nation's first all-news radio stations. He worked there as a reporter and anchor until 1966 when Westinghouse Broadcasting Company's Group W offered him a job. He quit school, relocated to Washington, D.C., and, at 28, became a White House correspondent. In the five years with Westinghouse Shaw's assignments included local and national urban affairs, and the struggles of Hispanics and Native Americans.
In 1971, Walter Cronkite helped Shaw land a job with CBS. Shaw started as a reporter for the CBS News Washington bureau and in three years became a correspondent. It was during this period that his career got a boost: he conducted an exclusive interview with then-attorney general John Mitchell. It was the height of the Watergate crisis and Mitchell, who was to be convicted for his role in the affair, was a major figure in the scandal. White House correspondent Shaw had pulled off a journalistic coup.
Hungry for International Experience
After nearly ten years of reporting from Capitol Hill, Shaw was restless. He was hungry for international experience. When ABC offered him the job of Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, an impressive but less visible position, he grabbed it. "I pushed myself out the door," Shaw told the New York Times. The three years he spent with ABC proved especially eventful.
As Latin American correspondent from 1977 to 1979, Shaw covered the 1979 resignation and exile of Nicaragua's enigmatic president, General Anastasio Somoza, and the months of simmering civil war that enveloped it. The year before, Shaw flew to South America when assigned to investigate rumors of a bizarre massacre in the remote jungles of Guyana. The scene was Jonestown, a religious commune named after its leader, Reverend Jim Jones, and populated by transplanted American families. Shaw was one of the first reporters to file from location, and he scooped the other networks by providing the only aerial photos of the tragedy. The picture that confronted them was sickening: the decomposing bodies of 911 men, women, and children who had died by drinking poisoned punch. The reverend had led the cultists to this mass suicide-execution as a reaction to a U.S. representative's investigation of alleged mistreatment of the American citizens. Shaw commented in Parade Magazine, "You know how cameramen will shoot 15 minutes of tape just to be sure they get one shot right? Well, at Jonestown, a cameraman could [only] shoot for about six seconds before turning around and retching. That's how bad it was."
Back at the bureau Shaw told a colleague that he felt very lucky to have gotten the Jonestown story, adding, as quoted in the Washington Post, "You always have luck when you hustle." And, as if to confirm this philosophy, ABC chose Shaw to file special reports during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis at the American embassy in Teheran. That led to Shaw's return to Washington as ABC's senior Capitol Hill correspondent.
1979 was a tumultuous year for personnel at ABC News. As a result, Shaw's colleague, Washington bureau chief George Watson, left to help start CNN, a 24-hour, all-news cable network. Watson urged Shaw to follow him as the new network's principal anchor. "I had been negotiating a new contract with ABC, but I was dissatisfied with the terms, so I started talking to [maverick broadcasting entrepreneur and CNN founder] Ted Turner," Shaw told New York magazine. "The time period in which I was trying to decide, it seemed like agony to me. I'd only been married three years and our children were very small, and I couldn't selfishly take that gamble by myself." His worries were compounded by an economy in recession with double digit inflation. "It's no exaggeration," Shaw added, "I walked around the dining room for two weeks, talking to myself. My wife, Linda, would wake up around one in the morning and come downstairs. So, finally we just sat down at the dining room table and she said, 'Okay, you should take the job, because if you don't and CNN takes off, I won't be able to live with you.'" Network bosses told Shaw it would ruin his career, but he disagreed. "I saw it as perhaps the last frontier on television," he told the New York Times. "The first all-news TV network seemed like revolutionary stuff to me."
"Chicken Noodle Network"
For three decades the rule of the Big Three had never been seriously challenged and, while they smugly claimed that no one else could pull together the resources to compete, Turner was telling Business Week, "The Turner broadcasting group is going to be the greatest business success story of all time."
The so-called "Chicken Noodle Network" began broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters on June 1, 1980. Using new satellite technology for live transmission, CNN's staff of three hundred fresh faces drew on ceaseless energy to get the news out as it was happening, at any hour of the day or night. The cable network's viewership rose and its presence began to be felt. But it wasn't until 1987 that it achieved a contender's rank. That status seemed to become official when Shaw's became the fourth chair--joining those of CBS, NBC, and ABC--in a nationally televised interview with then U.S. president Ronald Reagan, held in the Oval Office on the eve of the summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That event served to introduce CNN and Shaw to millions of non-cable viewers. Another nationally televised event only a few months later ingrained Shaw's face and style into viewers' minds. But not all liked what they saw.
In April of 1988 Shaw moderated the second presidential debate from Los Angeles. In his role, he seemed rough with the debate audience, warning them that he would tell them to keep quiet "only once." And, in general, he was his usual serious self. But it was his opening questions to the two candidates that caused a stir. George Bush was asked if he would be worried about the country under President Dan Quayle's leadership in the event Bush died before inauguration. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked if he would still be against the death penalty if someone "raped and murdered" his wife Kitty Dukakis. "I've heard the questions called ghoulish and tasteless," Shaw told the Washington Post, "I spent more than a day and a half working on those two questions. They were not asked with trivia in mind." It's difficult to accuse Shaw of being trivial. "I hope I didn't seem severe," he added, "I took the job seriously."
The next couple of years drew Shaw into international news. He covered the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit; President Bush's first visit to Eastern Europe, and his participation in the 1989 Economic Summit in Paris; Japanese Emperor Hirohito's funeral; and the 40th-anniversary North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Brussels. In May of 1989, Shaw received his biggest story yet: he provided 30 hours of continuous live coverage, worldwide, on the historic student demonstrations in Beijing, China. He was one of only two American anchors in Tiananmen Square when the Chinese government's tanks rolled in and crushed the pro-democracy movement.
From "The Center of Hell"
Although Shaw initially expressed doubts about the probability of war between the United States and Iraq, four months later he admitted in Gentlemen's Quarterly that this had been a "prediction grounded in hope." In January of 1991, he was in Baghdad to interview Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when history took a turn. On the 16th, just one day after the aborted interview, Shaw found himself stranded--along with CNN colleagues, Peter Arnett and John Holliman--in the enemy capital as the allied bombing attack launched the Gulf War. Shaw was one of the first reporters to announce to the world that the United States and its allies had gone to war, and CNN went on to provide continuous coverage for the conflict's duration. Even after every major newspaper had pulled out, after the Big Three's phone lines were cut, and after CNN lost its picture transmission, the network was able to make live reports from Baghdad via its secure phone line.
While the night sky was screaming with gunfire and air-raid warnings, the CNN trio crawled around the floor of their hotel room and delivered some of the most spellbinding audio reporting since Edward R. Murrow's harrowing World War II accounts of the Nazi bombing of London. "By the time we stopped broadcasting to get some sleep," Shaw told Parade Magazine, "I was so tired I was making no sense whatsoever. I was no sooner in bed and asleep when the bombing started again, and I stumbled down the hall in my pajamas to the suite where we broadcast and went back to work." The experience unnerved the characteristically composed anchor. He announced: "Clearly I've never been there, but it feels like we are in the center of hell."
CNN's coverage was being cited by top Pentagon officials at press conferences while being eagerly viewed by Iraqi officials. CBS and NBC humbled themselves by asking the cable network's reporters for interviews. Television coverage of the war belonged to CNN because it provided an uninterrupted flow of raw information. This process empowered the public: the viewer became the news editor. "We've been training for this story 24 hours a day for ten years," CNN's executive vice-president Ed Turner (no relation to Ted Turner) told the Chicago Tribune. Live wartime coverage from the center of enemy camp is unprecedented.
A Star Is Born
"Bernie" Shaw came back to the U.S. a star. But the kudos and popular attention seemed unprofessional and embarrassing to him. He was happy to be reunited with his family and had more private thoughts on his mind. "I came back from Baghdad a changed man," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I looked death in the eyes. No human gets many chances to do that twice."
The journey from the South Side of Chicago to Baghdad was a long one, but Shaw never wavered, and that could have been easy in the beginning. The 1950s had no "black Murrows" as role models for a poor, young black boy with dreams of broadcast journalism. "But I didn't see Ed Murrow as white," Shaw told the New York Times, "I saw him as a journalist." Shaw knew that it was certainly possible that he'd encounter racism along the way, but he has said that he has never been a knowing victim of it in his career.
Although he has never experienced racism in his career, Shaw raised the issue of racial profiling at the vice-presidential debate. As moderator of the second presidential debate in 1988, Shaw had asked the candidates to imagine a situation and then explain how they would respond. Using this same tactic, Shaw asked vice-presidential hopefuls Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney to imagine themselves as victims of racial profiling. Whereas in 1988, Shaw was criticized for asking Michael Dukakis if he would reverse his position on the death penalty if his own wife was a victim of a brutal crime, in 2000 Shaw managed to bring an issue that, only a few years before very few had even heard of, into the national consciousness.
As CNN's top anchor, Shaw stood at the helm of television's news phenomenon: a 24-hour, all-news cable network. In his twenty years at CNN, he saw the network evolve from a long-shot endeavor known as the "Chicken Noodle Network" to become the top-ranked televison news network. But, in November of 2000, Shaw announced to viewers that he was resigning from CNN, saying that, while he hoped to return for the occasional special assignment, he wanted to spend more time with his family. He also planned to focus much of his time on writing fiction, essays, and a primer on journalism. He decided his first writing project, however, would be his autobiography, for, as he told Broadcasting & Cable, "If I don't do it now, I'll never get it done."
In many ways, Shaw's departure heralded the end of an era at CNN. A rogue network no longer, talks for an AOL-Time Warner merger began. With a new management team on board, the network also launched plans to experiment with new types of programming. With his final newscast on February 28, 2001, Shaw left the anchor seat he had worked so hard to earn. He told Jet, "Harder than entering this business is leaving it."
Awards
International Platform Association, Lowell Thomas Electronic Journalist Award, 1988; National Academy of Cable Programming, Award for Cable Excellence, 1988; Emmy Award, 1989; 32nd annual International Film and TV Festival of New York, gold medal, 1989; National Association of Black Journalists, annual award, 1989; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, 1990; ACE Award, 1990; Bernard Shaw Endowment Fund created by University of Illinois, 1991; Eduard Rhein Foundation, Cultural-H/Journalistic Award, 1991; Cable Ace, Best Newscaster award, 1994.
Further Reading
Periodicals
- Broadcasting & Cable, November 13, 2000.
- Business Week, June 1980.
- Business Wire, February 12, 2001.
- Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1991.
- Essence, November 1990.
- Gentlemen's Quarterly, May 1991.
- Jet, November 27, 2000.
- Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1991.
- National Review, February 19, 2001.
- New York, February 1991.
- New York Times, February 2, 1988; March 20, 1988.
- Parade Magazine, June 23, 1991.
- St. Louis Dispatch, March 2, 2001.
- Time, February 22, 1988.
- Variety, November 13, 2000.
- Washington Post, June 22, 1991.
— Iva Sipal and Jennifer M. York
