Ed Bradley
American broadcast journalism in the latter half of the twentieth century was shaped by the rise of television news and the expansion of long-form investigative reporting as a serious journalistic form. Ed Bradley, born in Philadelphia on June 22, 1941, emerged from this environment to become one of the more prominent figures in American broadcast news during that period.
Educated at Mount Saint Charles Academy and Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, Bradley built a career that took him from war correspondence to the White House press corps before arriving at CBS News. He worked as a war correspondent, a White House correspondent, a news anchor, and a writer, demonstrating a range across the principal disciplines of broadcast journalism. He is particularly associated with 60 Minutes, the CBS News program where he reported for a substantial portion of his career. That platform gave him access to some of the most consequential interviews and investigative stories of the era, and his work there defined much of his public profile.
The breadth of Bradley's reporting was recognized through a considerable number of professional honors. He received the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, the Peabody Award, the Edward Murrow Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award, in addition to News and Documentary Emmy Awards. The accumulation of these distinctions across multiple awarding bodies reflected sustained recognition from institutions that evaluate different dimensions of journalistic practice, from broadcast craft to public-service reporting.
Bradley died in New York City on November 9, 2006. Among the many honors he collected over the course of his career, the George Polk Award and the Peabody Award stand as two of the more competitive recognitions in American journalism, and their presence in his record marks the consistent regard his peers and critics held for his contributions to CBS News and 60 Minutes.
Quotes by Ed Bradley
The only thing I’d ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio.
That’s when I hit the ground. So in the instant that that round landed and blew me in the air, I had those separate and distinct thoughts. The guy who was standing right next to where I had been standing had a hole in his back I could put my fist into.
I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that’s something I learned at an early age.
I’d watch my father get up at 5 o’clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business.
I think, in some ways, Michael Jackson is out of touch with reality, and I don’t think he has people around him who can say, Michael, can’t do this. Michael, you can’t do that. Michael, you can’t say this. You know, I think he has been so big for so long that he can do whatever he wants to do.
You can work hard to sharpen your talent, to get better at whatever it is that you do, and I think that’s what it comes back to.
Because when it gets to the point where it's not fun anymore, I've always hoped that I would have the courage to say goodbye and walk away from it.
