| Brian Stewart | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1942 Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Occupation | reporter |
| Known for | broadcast journalism |
Brian Stewart, one of Canada's most experienced journalists, is host of the foreign affairs show CBC News: Our World as well as senior correspondent of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's flagship news hour The National.
A leading reporter on The National since 1992, Mr. Stewart was also a host of the hour's current affairs segment The Magazine from 1998-2000. Prior to this post, Stewart was a senior reporter for The Journal as well as a back-up anchor for Barbara Frum. Though best-known for his television work, he started in print and was a political columnist with The Montreal Gazette from 1968 to 1971. He won a National Newspaper Award in 1969 for feature writing. He announced his retirement from the CBC on July 28, 2009.[1]
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Born in Montreal in 1942, Stewart was educated in Canada and England. He attended Toronto's Thornton Hall Private School and graduated from Ryerson's School of Journalism in 1964.
Stewart first joined the CBC in 1971 at CBMT Montreal as a host of the supper-hour television current affairs program Hourglass. In 1973 he was appointed a national reporter in Ottawa where he was the network's foreign affairs and military specialist. He became CBC's foreign correspondent in London in 1982 where he worked until joining NBC as a foreign correspondent in 1985. Stewart returned to Canada in 1987 to become senior reporter with The Journal, a post in which he wrote and hosted a series of specials on North American and world politics.
Stewart has been one of Canada's most prominent foreign correspondents. He covered many of the world's conflicts and has reported from nine war zones, from El Salvador to Beirut. During the Gulf War, he was the first Canadian reporter to get into the liberated Kuwait City. In the Sudan Civil War in 1989, his report on child slavery, Sudan: Children of Darkness (with Tony Burman), won several international awards, including the UNDA prize at the Monte Carlo Television Festival. He has worked extensively in underdeveloped countries and was the first North American reporter to focus the world's attention on the massive Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 (also with Tony Burman). In 1987, Stewart's career was the subject of a major documentary, The War Reporters, produced by Brian McKenna.
"Having Brian Stewart on a story meant no one could ever beat us," says Mark Starowicz, creator and executive producer of The Journal. "It would always be brilliant journalism and it would always be head and shoulders over any reportage by any other journalist in the world covering that story."
In the course of his reporting career, Stewart has interviewed such leading world's leading figures, including Margaret Thatcher, Lech Wałęsa, Nelson Mandela and Henry Kissinger.
Stewart is married to former journalist Tina Srebotnjak and they have a daughter, Katie Stewart (b. 1993). The Stewart family lives in Toronto.
Stewart received the Gemini Award as "Best Overall Broadcast Journalist," the prestigious Gordon Sinclair Award, in 1996. Nominated for numerous Geminis, he won "Best Information Segment" in 1994 for Rwanda: Autopsy of a Genocide, in which he uncovered advanced warnings of the mass murders. In 1995, his moving report Return To Ethiopia was broadcast internationally and his documentary The Somalia Affair won top prize for investigative reporting at the Canadian Association of Journalists awards in 1993.
In May 2004, he presented the Convocation Address during the 160th Anniversary of Toronto's Knox College, University of Toronto, titled On the Front Lines[1].