Barry Petersen is an Emmy Award-winning CBS News Correspondent.[1] He has reported from around the world on numerous issues, including wars, natural disasters, Paris fashions, the fading popularity of Welsh choirs, and the return of American Jazz to Shanghai, China.[1] His stories have been datelined from virtually every continent in a career with CBS News that spans more than three decades.[1]
Petersen also wrote "Jan’s Story: Love lost to the long goodbye of Alzheimer's" published in June, 2010, detailing the personal account of his wife's diagnosis with early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2005.[1][2] Jan was also a CBS News journalist,[1] reporting from both Japan and the former Soviet Union for CBS News Radio, CBS News Sunday Morning, and the CBS Weekend News.
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Barry Rex Petersen is the son of Mavis and Kermit Petersen. Kermit Petersen was a career US Army pilot who flew in both the Second World War and the Korean War. Upon retirement, Kermit Petersen moved his family to Sidney, MT, home to his own father, Holger, who had emigrated from Denmark in the early part of the 20th Century. Barry graduated from Sidney Senior High School in 1966 and went on to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism where he graduated with a BSJ (1970) and MSJ (1972).
Petersen got his first taste of newspaper journalism as editor of the high school newspaper The Spokesman, and as a sports columnist for the Sidney Herald, Sidney, MT. He started his newspaper career as a delivery boy for the Billings Gazette and then, while attending Northwestern University, went on to write articles for that same paper. During college, he was a summer intern for the Omaha World-Herald (1967), the Miami Herald (1968), and then worked full time at the Arlington Day (1968–69) and as a copyeditor and columnist for Chicago Today (1970). He was also Publisher of the Daily Northwestern (1970). Upon graduation, he was hired as a general assignment reporter for the Milwaukee Journal (1970–1971).
In 1971, Peterson became an investigative reporter for WITI-TV in Milwaukee, WI, where he won several awards for his reports. He was also elected president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). In 1972, he went to work at WCCO-TV, Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, where he worked as a reporter, anchor, and host of a weekly public affairs broadcast. He co-anchored coverage of the 1978 funeral of Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-MN), and filed extensive reports from Minnesota, Iowa, and North and South Dakota on the Midwestern drought throughout the mid-1970s that left farmers, ranchers, and many small town businesses bankrupt. His reports were often seen on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Petersen was hired by CBS News in 1978, reporting first from the Los Angeles Bureau and then in 1981 moving to the San Francisco Bureau. While based in San Francisco, Petersen did the first network TV news report on a then-new disease called Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
He went on to be the Correspondent and Bureau Chief for the CBS News Bureau in Moscow (1988–1991). From the then USSR, he reported from inside the Lithuanian Parliament the night it voted to become the first Republic to declare independence from the then Soviet Union, and covered pro-democracy rallies from Ukraine to Red Square. He did stories from Moscow, Cuba, Malta, and Washington, DC on Mikhail Gorbachev's summit meetings with world leaders, including with U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1989 he traveled to Beijing for Gorbachev's summit trip, a summit which prompted the historic and simultaneous democracy uprising in Tiananmen Square.
He was transferred to the CBS News London Bureau (1991–1995) where his coverage responsibilities included Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He was embedded with US troops in Baghdad, reported on US troops during Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and reported from several aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf during the ongoing conflicts with Iraq. He covered the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). He traveled extensively to Sarajevo as part of his reporting from the former Yugoslavian federation republics of Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Kosovo, and Macedonia.
His reports from Europe covered topics from the tensions between then East and West Berlin, the independence movement in Scotland to break away from the United Kingdom, the ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland, the neo-Nazi movement in Germany, and the failing marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
After returning to the CBS News Tokyo and Beijing Bureaus (1995–2009) Petersen was the first American television journalist who reported from inside a courtroom in Communist China. He was among the very first reporters on the scene of the Asian tsunami of 2004, and returned to both Thailand and Indonesia several times to follow-up on relief efforts. From Kathmandu, Nepal, he did a story on a young American boy believed to be a reincarnated Buddhist monk. He also covered the Olympic Winter Games in Nagano, Japan (1998), and the Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia (2000) and Beijing, China (2008) for both CBS News and CBS Sports.
During his career, he has interviewed the famous and the infamous, including Hollywood stars Jimmy Stewart,[1] Bill Cosby,[1] Pierce Brosnan,[1] Sir Anthony Hopkins,[1] singer Tom Jones, leaders of the Bosnian War who were later tried as war criminals,[1] and the President of the South Seas nation of Kiribati.
Peterson married Jan Chorlton in San Francisco in 1985, and in 1986 they moved to Japan (1986–1987) where he was based in the CBS News Tokyo Bureau, beginning a long career as a foreign correspondent.
Petersen now lives in Denver, CO, where he continues reporting for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood. His daughters, Emily and Juliette, also live in Denver.
Petersen’s awards include an Emmy Award for a 1996 series for the CBS Evening News on American adopted Vietnamese orphans who were returning to visit their homeland for the first time. He earned another Emmy Award for his report on the Siege of Sarajevo for CBS News Sunday Morning. He has been nominated as a finalist for Emmy Awards on numerous occasions, including for his reporting from Rwanda and China.
Petersen was part of the CBS News team covering the student uprising and government crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989[1] that was honored with an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award[1] and a George Foster Peabody Award.[1] For his work with CBS News Radio he won the 1999 New York Festivals International Radio Awards "World Gold Medal" for his coverage of the Indonesian riots, and an Edward R. Murrow Award for sports writing in 2002. A radio documentary, “Newsmark: Barry Petersen’s Tokyo,” produced by Jill Landes, won the Ohio State Award for Achievement of Merit in 1988.
In 2009 he was honored for his body of work by the Asian American Journalist Association (AAJA).
Petersen rode out on a tank with Soviet troops retreating from Afghanistan in 1989. A segment of that report was later featured in the Mike Nichols movie Charlie Wilson’s War. He also played the part of a skeptical American diplomat in the movie Pokhorony Stalina ('Stalin's Funerals', 1990) filmed in Moscow and written and directed by noted Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
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