Lester Holt, Joy Reid leave TV anchor gigs amid shuffling lineups
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After 50 years on CBS News, where she “grew up” as a journalist, Rita Braver is heading into retirement.
The award-winning “CBS Sunday Morning” national correspondent will retire at the end of March, per a memo that Rand Morrison, the program’s executive producer, sent to staff Wednesday.
“It’s time to share some news that most of us already know but are reluctant to accept. Our beloved, longtime Sunday Morning colleague… national correspondent Rita Braver will retire at the end of this month,” Morrison’s memo, which was obtained by USA TODAY, began.
“Those who know Rita and Sunday Morning realize how essential she’s been to our work. … To call it this end of an era barely does justice to the challenges we’ll face now that we can no longer pick up the phone and call on Rita,” the note continued.
Braver embarked on her broadcast journalism career at the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL-TV and was hired as a news desk editor at CBS News’ Washington bureau in 1972. She worked her way up to chief White House correspondent in 1993, then was named a national correspondent in 1997
During her tenure, she worked on programs such as “48 Hours,” “Street Stories,” “Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel,” “Face the Nation” and “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.” She contributed “Eye on America” segments for “CBS Evening News,” where she also served as chief law correspondent from 1983 to 1993.
Braver, who has interviewed big names from former Presidents Bill Clinton to Gloria Steinem, U.S. Rep John Lewis, Barbra Streisand, James Taylor and Sheryl Crow, celebrated a half century with the broadcaster in 2022.
“Over the years, I got to cover some of the biggest events of my lifetime, starting – when I was just an apprentice on the news desk – with Watergate,” she said in a “CBS Sunday Morning” segment that aired May 15, 2022. “When I started, we shot our stories on 16 millimeter film. If we needed to call in from the field, we had to find a pay phone. There were no computers, much less internet. Yet, we got our stories in every day.”
She concluded the segment by saying, “That first day was really the beginning of my 50-year love-affair with CBS News. Like my marriage, which started about the same time, it’s had its highs and lows, some exasperating moments, and some too magical to ever forget.
“Yet, I count myself lucky, after all these years, to have the kind of job I always dreamed about.”
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