Veteran broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr died at a Washington hospital Friday morning, according to National Public Radio. Schorr was 93.
Schorr, who began as a foreign newspaper correspondent in 1946, helped launch CNN as its senior Washington correspondent in 1980 after two decades with CBS. NPR, which Schorr joined as senior news analyst in 1985, said he died peacefully after a short illness.
His coverage put him on Richard Nixon's infamous "enemies list."
Remembering Daniel Schorr, his fellow leaker Daniel Ellsberg noted that they each had been confronted with questions about motivation and profit.
In 1976, Schorr leaked the Pike report — the findings of an Intelligence Committee investigation into questionable CIA activities, which the House had voted to keep secret — to the Village Voice. Schorr asked the Voice to make a donation to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Even Schorr asking for a donation from the Voice raised questions about whether he had profited financially from his leak. He hadn't. But the transaction may have cost Schorr anyway.
At the time, Schorr accused the Reporters Committee, which had put him in touch with a lawyer to aid publication of the report in book form, of having blown his cover.
Schorr covered the rebuilding of Western Europe for the Christian Science Monitor starting in 1946. He joined Edward R. Murrow's CBS news team as its Washington diplomatic correspondent in 1953.
Schorr resigned from CBS in 1976 after the network suspended him amid a controversy over the leaking of a secret U.S. intelligence report. Schorr refused to tell Congress the source of the document, citing his First Amendment protections.
CNN founder Ted Turner hired Schorr in 1979 as he was preparing to launch the Cable News Network the next summer. Schorr quit CNN in 1985 and soon joined NPR.
Many award had he get, included a Peabody for "a lifetime of uncompromising reporting of the highest integrity," three Emmys and the duPont-Columbia Golden Baton.
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