News

November 29, 2009

CBS news icon Birnbaum dies

JENNIFER PELTZ Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK — CBS News producer Bernard Birnbaum, who helped shape the public’s view of issues ranging from poverty to the Watergate scandal while working alongside Walter Cronkite and Charles Kuralt, has died, the network said.

Birnbaum died on Thanksgiving Day at Stony Brook University Medical Center in Stony Brook, N.Y., after having a heart attack while visiting relatives nearby, CBS News said in a statement Saturday. He was 89.

Birnbaum’s CBS career won him seven Emmy Awards and took him to places ranging from Vietnam to the small-town America seen in “On the Road with Charles Kuralt.”

He and Kuralt first joined forces on the acclaimed 1964 documentary “Christmas in Appalachia,” about unemployed miners in Kentucky. As a producer for “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” and other programs, Birnbaum covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War and Watergate in depth.

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