EOTO 3: Bernard Shaw

                                                        The Exciting Life of Bernard Shaw 

Bernard Shaw was known as one of the biggest innovators for CNN and Television Journalism as a whole.

Born May 22,1940 in Chicago, IL , Shaw was interested in journalism at a very young age. As a child, he used to watch the Television broadcasts of famous journalist Edward R. Morrow who inspired him to become a journalist when he got older. Throughout his teenage years he had been an avid reader of newspapers  and got involved with his high school paper to grow deeper into the scene of journalism. Adding on, he read over the school announcements for his high school through their public address system. 

In 1959 after finishing high school, Shaw enlisted into the U.S Marine Corp and was a member for four years until 1963. While he was a part of the Marines, Shaw met Walter Cronkite; a CBS correspondent and told him he was going to be working alongside him in the future after his time with the marines.

In 1964, a year after he stopped serving in the Marines, he enrolled in the University of Illinois and began to work as a radio news reporter and TV news writer. Furthermore, the Westinghouse Broadcast Corporation offered him to cover a story for the White House. Shaw was a radio news writer and radio news reporter until 1968 and took a leave until 1971 when he became a reporter for CBS. 

Shaw became well-known very fast while working for CBS that in 1974, he was offered a promotion to become a correspondent for CBS but declined and joined ABC as a Latin correspondent in 1977. As he was working for ABC, he wrote stories on things like the Jonestown incident in Guyana and interviewed Fidel Castro who was a Cuban president. After his voyage, he returned to Washington D.C. in 1979 to cover a story about Capitol Hill and the hostage crisis in Iran.

At the start of the decade in 1980, Shaw helped launch CNN and became the head anchor for the news station as a whole. He made ground-breaking impacts for the company by moderating a presidential debate in 1988 and covering the protest of Chinese students at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Within the early 90’s, Shaw covered stories within big events like the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991 being one of many. After many years of being within the field of journalism, Shaw retired in 2001 with a whole line of success in his belt..Shaw won numerous awards after his retirement including, the  Foster Peabody Award (1990), the University of Missouri’s Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism (1992), and the Congress of Racial Equality’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Outstanding Achievement (1993)Unfortunately ,Bernard Shaw passed away in 2022 due to pneumonia but will be remembered as one of the most influential TV journalists of all time.