Bernard Shaw

1993 Honoree

Bernard Shaw, principal Cable Network News (CNN) anchor for Washington, D.C., is an eyewitness to history. When Operation Desert Storm's air attacks began January 16, 1991, this remarkable man was in Baghdad. Disregarding their own safety, Shaw and his colleagues captivated radio and television audiences around the world with their gripping accounts of the bombings.

Shaw received many awards for his outstanding reporting ranging from the Italian government's President's award to the cable industry's Golden Award for Excellence.

Shaw's life underscores the fact that excellence does not come overnight; it builds over time and depends upon one's ability and the quality of one's experience.

Shaw credits his parents and those teachers from grade school through college who "saw a spark and fanned the flame." He also says his development as a journalist and human being was helped "by having talked to and been touched by such giants as Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr."

Shaw has carried the torch of broadcast journalism from Tiananmen Square where Chinese students demonstrated and died for human rights to reporting on the activities of the great and near-great throughout the world.

This strong man grew up on Chicago's South Side and graduated from the University of Illinois. In 1991, he "gave back some of what was given" by donating 550,000 to his alma mater, establishing the Bernard Shaw Endowment Fund. It provides scholarships at the Chicago campus to help create strong men and women of the future.