Ed Gordon (journalist)

Personal background

Gordon's parents were both schoolteachers, and Gordon's father Edward Lansing Gordon, Jr. won a gold medal in the 1932 Summer Olympics for competing in the long jump. In 1971, when Ed Gordon was 11, his father died. Gordon graduated from Western Michigan University in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications and political science. Although Gordon considered law school, Gordon aspired to be a television journalist and took an unpaid internship at WTVS, the PBS affiliate in Detroit. At WTVS, he worked as a production assistant from 1983 to 1985.

Career

In 1986, Gordon became host of a local weekly talk show, Detroit Black Journal, which had a yearly salary of $11,000. On the side, Gordon worked as a freelance journalist at the then-fledgling cable network Black Entertainment Television and in 1988 became anchor of the weekly program BET News, which covered African-American social issues and popular culture. While Gordon worked at BET, its news staff had only around 20 people, and Gordon produced most of his interviews with only one or two assistants.

Following the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Gordon hosted a BET special, Black Men Speak Out: The Aftermath and interviewed President George H. W. Bush about the riots. Gordon also hosted hour-long interviews on several occasions in the series Conversations with Ed Gordon. His subjects have included President Bill Clinton, actor/director, rapper Tupac Shakur, Sidney Poitier, and singer Whitney Houston.

On January 25, 1996, Gordon became the first journalist to interview former NFL star O. J. Simpson since Simpson was acquitted of murder the previous year. Gordon also joined NBC News as a contributor to Dateline NBC and Today and hosted the MSNBC talk show Internight.

After BET fired the host of its nightly news program BET Tonight (Tavis Smiley) in 2001, Gordon took over as host. As part of a reorganization focusing on entertainment productions, BET cut its news staff and canceled BET Tonight in December 2002 along with other public affairs shows hosted by Gordon, Lead Story and Teen Summit. That month, Gordon interviewed outgoing Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (Republican of Mississippi) following Lott's controversial remarks at the 100th birthday party for fellow Senator Strom Thurmond that the nation would have been better off had Thurmond, a segregationist, been elected for president in 1948.

Gordon became a correspondent for the CBS News program 60 Minutes Wednesday in November 2004. After Tavis Smiley left National Public Radio (NPR), Gordon began hosting a show on NPR titled News & Notes, with a similar focus on African-American issues. Gordon began hosting the syndicated talk show Our World with Black Enterprise in September 2006. He was also nominated to the Alumni Academy of the Western Michigan University School of Communication in 2006.

BET announced in March 2010 that Gordon would return to the network to host "a variety of news programs and specials." Gordon's latest series Weekly with Ed Gordon premiered on October 3, 2010 with a one-on-one interview with Representative Charles B. Rangel, who was undergoing an ethics issues at the time. In the program, Gordon also discusses news and culture with a four-member panel.

Personal life

Gordon married Karen Haney, a computer specialist. In 1993, they had a daughter, Taylor.