Bernard Shaw, CNN’s 1st chief anchor, dies at 82

New York, September 9

Bernard Shaw, former CNN anchor and a pioneering Black journalist remembered for his blunt question at a presidential debate and calmly reporting the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991 from Baghdad as it was under attack, has died. He was 82.

He died of pneumonia, unrelated to covid, on Wednesday at a hospital in Washington, according to Tom Johnson, CNN’s former chief executive.

A former CBS and ABC newsman, Shaw took a chance and accepted an offer to become CNN’s chief anchor at its launch in 1980. He later reported before a camera hurriedly set up in a newsroom after the 1981 assassination attempt on president Ronald Regan.

He retired aged 61 in 2001.

As moderator of a 1988 presidential debate between George HW Bush and Michael Dukakis, he asked the Democrat — a death penalty opponent — whether he would support that penalty for someone found guilty of raping and murdering Dukakis’ wife Kitty.

Dukakis’ coolly technocratic response was widely seen as damaging to his campaign, and Shaw said he got a flood of hate mail later for asking it.

“Since when did a question hurt a politician?” Shaw said in an interview aired by CSPAN in 2001. “It wasn’t the question. It was the answer.”

“He put CNN on the map,” said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief and now a professor at George Washington University.

Shaw, who grew up in Chicago wanting to be a journalist and admiring legendary CBS newsmen Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite, recognised it as a key moment.

“In all of the years of preparing to being an anchor, one of the things I strove for was to be able to control my emotions in the midst of hell breaking out,” Shaw said in a 2014 interview with NPR.

“And I personally feel that I passed my stringent test for that in Baghdad.”

His funeral will be private, with a public memorial planned for later, Johnson said. He is survived by his wife, Linda, and two children.