Schorr Enough

Daniel Schorr, who managed to get on the enemies lists of both CBS News and Richard Nixon, has died at the age of 93 following a short illness. A protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, he made a name for himself in 1957 when he persuaded Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev to sit for an interview for Face the Nation, but got get kicked out of the country for conflicts with Soviet censors. He won 3 Emmys for his coverage of the Watergate scandal, and his blunt reporting earned him a spot on Nixon’s enemies list, which he discovered while reading the list during a live broadcast. He ran afoul of his CBS uber-bosses in 1976 when he obtained a copy of a suppressed House of Representatives committee report on the questionable activities of the CIA. CBS declined to publish it, so he passed it on to The Village Voice. When suspicion pointed to his CBS colleague Lesley Stahl, he initially let her take the rap before coming forward. He refused to reveal his source to a House committee, narrowly avoiding a citation, but he was forced to resign by CBS. He later became the first employee of CNN as senior news analyst in 1979, remaining there until 1984, when he refused to be paired with John Connally, ex-Texas Governor and Nixon Treasure secretary for commentary on the 1984 Republican Convention. His contract was not renewed, and he left in 1985 to become senior news analyst for NPR, where he didn’t have enough listeners to piss anyone off. He remained a commentator there for the last 25 years, with his last commentary airing July 10.