NEWS

By ZACH HOSKINS
School of Journalism and Mass Communication

CHAPEL HILL — Award-winning CBS journalist Randall Pinkston will share his experiences during two decades of reporting from around the world in a free public address March 22 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Pinkston’s speech, this year’s Nelson Benton Lecture in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will be at 5 p.m. in Carroll Hall auditorium.

Pinkston, 54, has been a CBS News correspondent since 1990. Reporting regularly for "CBS Evening News" and other broadcasts, he has covered the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the front lines. He reported on the Albanian refugee crisis in Kosovo, the 1995 U.S. intervention in Haiti, the Unabomber story and many other events.

Last September, Pinkston came to Carolina with other reporters, editors and military personnel for a school-sponsored seminar about the pros and cons of embedded reporting and the impact of technology on war coverage. Pinkston, who was not embedded with a military unit in Iraq, said fact-finding and accuracy were reporters’ greatest challenges during the conflict.

"Find out what happened and make sure it’s right," he said. "What you report is what you absolutely know."

From 1990-1994, Pinkston was CBS’ White House correspondent. He covered the first Persian Gulf war, and he broke the story of then-President Bush’s illness while dining with Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa.

Pinkston won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in 1996 and the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association for his work as reporter on the documentary "CBS Reports: Legacy of Shame." He also won Emmys for his coverage of Princess Diana’s death, in 1998, and of the TWA Flight 800 disaster, in 1997.

Pinkston is the 10th speaker in the Benton Lecture Series, which began in 1991 with a speech by Dan Rather of CBS. Other lecturers in the series were CBS journalists Walter Cronkite, Charles Kuralt, Bill Plante, Bob Schieffer and Draggan Mihailovich; ABC News correspondent Cokie Roberts; CNN reporter Carol Lin; and former Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles Moose, a UNC alumnus, who led the 2002 sniper investigation in the Washington, D.C., area.

Family and friends of Benton established the lecture series at UNC in 1989; in 1993, Benton’s wife, Milli, and his son, Joe, worked with Dr. Richard Cole, school dean, to center the lecture series in the school. Joe Benton, of Falls Church, Va., is a member of the school's board of visitors.

Benton died in 1988 at age 63 after a career with CBS News that spanned more than 20 years. Born in Danville, Va., Benton earned his degree from UNC in 1949. The next year, he established the first TV news department in the Southeast at WBTV in Charlotte. In 1960, he joined CBS News in New York City as an assignment editor and reporter.

During the early 1970s, Benton was an anchor on "CBS Morning News." He covered Watergate and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. He won an Emmy for a special broadcast about the Watergate tapes. When the country faced an acute shortage of energy resources in the 1970s, he pioneered the energy beat for CBS News.

- 30 -

School contact: Zach Hoskins, assistant dean for communication, (919) 966-3323, zhoskins@email.unc.edu

News Services contact: L.J. Toler, 919-962-8589, laura_toler@unc.edu