Roger Mudd Biography
Roger Mudd born Roger Harrison Mudd, is a retired American broadcast journalist who worked as a correspondent and anchor for CBS News and NBC News. Most recently he worked as the primary anchor for The History Channel.
Previously, he anchored weekend and weekday substitute for the CBS Evening News, the co-anchor of the weekday NBC Nightly News, and the host of the NBC-TV Meet the Press, and American Almanac TV programs. Mudd won Peabody Award, the Joan Shorenstein Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting, and five Emmy Awards.
Roger Mudd’s photoRoger Mudd Age/Height/Hair
Roger was born on 9 February 1928. He is 91 years old as of 2019, his hair colour is grey and he stands a height of 1.8m.
Roger Mudd Family
Mudd was born in Washington, D.C. to John Kostka Dominic Mudd, the son of a tobacco farmer, and his mother Irma Iris Harrison, the daughter of a farmer. His mother was a lieutenant for the U.S. Army Nursing Corps and then a nurse at the physiotherapy ward in the Walter Reed Hospital, where she met Roger’s father.
Roger Mudd Wife
He was married to Emma Jeanne Spears Mudd from 1957 to 2011 when she died.
Roger Mudd University | Roger Mudd College
Roger Mudd graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1950 with a B.A. degree where one of his classmates was author Tom Wolfe. Later he earned an M.A. degree from the University of North Carolina in 1953. He is a member of Delta Tau Delta international fraternity.
Roger Mudd Career
Mudd started his journalism career in Richmond, Virginia as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader and for radio station WRNL. He worked at the rewrite desk at the News Leader, during spring 1953 and became a summer replacement on June 15 that year. On June 19, 1953. The News Leader ran its first story with a Mudd byline.
While at WRNL radio, Mudd did the daily noon newscast. Mudd describes an incident from his first day at WRNL in his memoir The Place to Be, in which he laughed hysterically on-air after mangling a news item about the declining health of Pope Pius XII. Because Mudd failed to silence his microphone properly, an engineer intervened.
He was later given his own daily broadcast, Virginia Headlines by WRNL. Mudd enrolled in the University of Richmond School of Law in the fall of 1954, but he dropped out after one semester.
Roger Mudd CBS
CBS News located on the third floor of WTOP’s studios at 40th and Brandywine in northwestern Washington, D.C. discovered Mud and without wasting time got him to join the Washington bureau on May 31, 1961. In most of his time at CBS, Mudd was a Congressional correspondent.
He also anchored the Saturday edition of CBS Evening News and he frequently substituted on the weeknight broadcasts when the anchorman Walter Cronkite was on vacation or working on special assignments. Mudd anchored the August 28, 1963 coverage of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for CBS, during the Civil Rights Movement.
CBS-TV broadcasted the documentary Case History of a Rumor, on November 13, 1963, in which Mudd interviewed Rep. James Utt, a Republican of Santa Ana, California, about a rumour that Utt spread about Africans who were supposedly working with the United Nations to take over the United States. Utt later sued CBS-TV in U.S. Federal Court for libel, but the court dismissed the case.
He also covered numerous political campaigns. He was also paired with CBS journalist Robert Trout for the August 1964 Democratic National Convention anchor booth, temporarily displacing Walter Cronkite, in an unsuccessful attempt to match the popular NBC Chet Huntley–David Brinkley anchor team.
He also covered the 1968 Presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and interviewed him on June 5, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles only minutes before Kennedy was murdered.
In 1971, Mudd hosted the seminal documentary The Selling of the Pentagon. He later succeeds Walter Cronkite as an anchor of the CBS Evening News. After the longtime White House and 60 Minutes correspondent threatened to leave the network for ABC News, the network management gave the position to Rather, despite substantial support for Mudd within the ranks of CBS News and an offer to co-host with Dan Rather.
Roger Mudd NBC News
Mudd and Dan Rather were in contention to succeed Walter Cronkite in 1980, as the weeknight anchor of the CBS Evening News. Mudd chose to leave CBS News after CBS awarded the job to Rather, and he accepted an offer to join NBC News. From April 1982 until September 1983, when Brokaw took over as sole anchor, he co-anchored the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.
Mudd was the co-moderator of the NBC Meet the Press program with Marvin Kalb, from 1984 to 1985, and later he served as the co-anchor with Connie Chung on two NBC news magazines, American Almanac and 1986.
Roger Mudd Samuel Mudd
Mudd is an indirect, distant relative of Dr Samuel Mudd, the doctor who was implicated with inadvertently aiding John Wilkes Booth shortly after he assassinated U.S. President Abraham Lincoln
Roger Mudd Washington And Lee
Roger Mudd is a 1950 graduate of Washington and Lee, where he majored in history. He received a master’s degree, also in history, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. He began his journalism career in Richmond, VA., as a reporter for the Richmond News Leader newspaper and for WRNL, a local radio station.
He moved to Washington in the late 1950s and worked at WTOP News before joining the Washington bureau of CBS News in 1961.
Mudd published his memoir, The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News, in 2008. Between 1992 and 1996, he was a visiting professor of politics and the press at Princeton University and at Washington and Lee University.
He is a member of the advisory committee for W&L’s department of journalism and mass communications. He is also on the board of the National Portrait Gallery and on the advisory boards of the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Jepson School of Leadership at the University of Richmond. In 2010, Mudd donated his papers to Washington and Lee’s Leyburn Library.
That gift followed his 2006 donation of his collection of 20th-century Southern fiction. He was awarded the University’s Washington Award in 2011, in recognition of his distinguished leadership and service to the nation and extraordinary acts of philanthropy in support of W&L and other institutions.
Roger Mudd Dead Or Alive
Roger is very much alive.
Roger Mudd Center For Ethics
The Roger Mudd Center for Ethics advances dialogue, teaching, and research about issues of public and professional ethics across all three of the University’s schools – the College, the Williams School, and the School of Law.
Roger Mudd Net Worth
His exact net worth and salary is not revealed, it is obvious that he earns an impressive amount of money as a journalist and an anchor.
Roger Mudd Kennedy Interview | Roger Mudd Ted Kennedy
Mudd is often remembered for an interview he conducted with Senator Ted Kennedy for a CBS Reports special on November 4, 1979, Teddy, telecast three days before Kennedy announced his challenge to President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic Presidential nomination. In addition to questioning Kennedy about the Chappaquiddick incident, Mudd asked, “Senator, why do you want to be President?”
Kennedy’s stammering answer which has been described as “incoherent and repetitive” as well as “vague, unprepared” raised serious questions about his motivation in seeking the office and marked the beginning of the sharp decline in Kennedy’s poll numbers. Carter defeated Kennedy 50 per cent to 38 per cent in the Democratic primary vote.
Although the Kennedy family refused to permit any further interviews by Mudd, the interview helped strengthen Mudd’s reputation as a leading political reporter.
Broadcaster and blogger Hugh Hewitt and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson have used the term “Roger Mudd moment” to describe a self-inflicted disastrous encounter with the press by a presidential candidate.