Morley Safer

The son of an Austrian immigrant whose family was lost to the Nazi purges, Canadian-born journalist Morley Safer grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, reading several newspapers a day and listening to radio dispatches from Europe. As a cub reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting System during the Fifties, Safer served his apprenticeship in London, where he would later be posted as a bureau chief for the American network, CBS. Initially uncomfortable with the transition from writing the news to appearing on-camera, Safer distinguished himself during two tours of duty in Vietnam, where his reporting on atrocities committed by U.S. troops changed the national perception of the war in Southeast Asia and drew the ire of then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, who branded Safer anti-American. In 1970, Safer accepted a correspondent's position on the groundbreaking news magazine program "60 Minutes" (CBS, 1968- ). Safer's probing but anti-sensational approach to news-gathering made him an audience favorite, a trusted voice, and an avuncular tonic to the show's muckraking star, Mike Wallace, with whom Safer frequently found himself in contretemps. A multiple Emmy Award winner and recipient of a host of awards for journalistic excellence, Morley Safer's more than 50-year career stamped him as an international icon of old school journalism, a television news pioneer and one of the last links to the golden age of news reporting, staying on staff at "60 Minutes" until the week before his death from pneumonia at the age of 84 on May 19, 2016.