Bob Schieffer is one of broadcast journalism’s most experienced Washington, D.C. reporters. He has covered the U.S. capital for CBS News for more than 40 years and is among the few print or broadcast correspondents to have reported on Washington’s four major beats—the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and Capitol Hill. Schieffer has been chief Washington correspondent at CBS News since 1982 and the network’s congressional correspondent since 1989. He serves as anchor and moderator of Face the Nation, the CBS News Sunday half-hour public affairs program, a position Schieffer has held since 1991.
Schieffer was born in Austin, Texas, in 1937. He grew up in a politically minded family in Fort Worth. As he recounts in his book Bob Schieffer's America: "It's no wonder I love politics …. My mother was a Yellow Dog Democrat (she would vote for a yellow dog before she would vote for someone other than a Democrat.) The first politician I ever saw was Lyndon Johnson, who came to campaign on a vacant lot where we played ball in Fort Worth in 1948 when I was eleven years old and he was running for the Senate …. My brother … was elected the youngest member of the state legislature [when he was 24 in 1972.]" Bob Schieffer attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He studied English and journalism and graduated in 1959.
Reporting the Vietnam War, Joining CBS News, Becoming a “Living Legend"
Before joining CBS News, Schieffer worked as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 1965, the newspaper sent Schieffer to Vietnam to write a column about Texans living in the region. This assignment recognized Schieffer as the first journalist from a Texas newspaper to report from Vietnam. When Schieffer returned to Texas, he was invited by the local television station BAP-TV Dallas/Fort Worth to discuss the Vietnam War on the station’s talk show. Soon after Schieffer’s appearance the station offered him a job in broadcasting. Schieffer accepted and became news anchor of BAP-TV.
Schieffer joined CBS News in 1969 as a general assignment reporter, and then was promoted to Pentagon correspondent, a post he occupied for four years. Schieffer made the switch to television broadcasting in 1973, when he was named anchor of the CBS Sunday Night News. He has been a CBS News principal anchor since that time, while maintaining his role as correspondent and host of Face the Nation. During Schieffer’s extensive career he has earned seven Emmy awards for outstanding achievement and two Sigma Delta Chi awards for excellence in journalism. Since 1972, he has been a floor reporter at every Democratic and Republican National Convention and has covered each subsequent presidential campaign. He has anchored scores of breaking stories, including the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister YitzhakRabin in 1995 and the Olympic bombing in Atlanta, Georgia, for which Schieffer won a 1996 Emmy award for outstanding coverage of a breaking news story.
Schieffer carries a distinctive list of awards and career achievement tributes. In 2002, the National Press Foundation named Schieffer Broadcaster of the Year. He received the International Radio and Television Society Foundation Award and the American News Women’s Club Helen Thomas Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2004. Schieffer's alma mater, Texas Christian University, established the Schieffer School of Journalism in his honor in 2005; and in 2008, Schieffer was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress.
In 1996—after 20 years as anchor of the CBS Evening News (Saturday edition)—Schieffer resigned. His tenure was the longest for an anchor of a regularly scheduled network news broadcast.
Not only has Schieffer excelled as a broadcast journalist, he is the author of the best-selling books Bob Schieffer’s America (2008); Face The Nation: My Favorite Stories from the First 50 Years of the Award-winning News Broadcast (2004); and This Just In: What I Couldn’t Tell You On TV (2003). In 1989, he and Gary Paul Gates co-wrote The Acting President, a book about Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
A Conversation With BobSchieffer
Schieffer reversed roles from interviewer to interviewee in March 2003, when he spoke with a reporter at JournalismJobs.com about his career and present-day journalism. Here is an excerpt of that conversation:
JournalismJobs.com: What's the most challenging aspect of anchoring Face the Nation?
BobSchieffer: Number one, it's a lot of fun. I can't think of any other job in journalism where the newsmakers come to you. The most challenging aspect of it is not interviewing the people, but getting the right people at the right time to be interviewed. There's fierce competition between all the networks to get the guest who can bring the most pertinent information about whatever the story of the moment happens to be. It's getting the right person that's the challenge. Once we get them in the studio, you interview a person the same way you would interview another. You ask them a question. You let them answer. You try to listen closely and then ask a follow-up
JournalismJobs.com: Is journalism at its best right now?
BobSchieffer: Journalism is very good right now. We're far from perfect. It's a human enterprise. But I can't think of any country in the world that has a citizenry that is more informed than the American people. For sure, the American people have access to more information now than any other people who have ever lived on earth. And I think we do a pretty good job of sorting out what's important.
Amy O'Loughlin - Amy O'Loughlin is an award-winning freelance writer with 13 years experience in newspaper, magazine, web-based magazine, and business ...
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