Former CNN Anchor to Give Convocation Address

Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown will deliver the keynote address at the spring 2007 convocation for graduates of the Cronkite School. The ceremony will be held May 11 at Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium on ASU’s Tempe campus. Brown, who is the John J. Rhodes Chair in Public Policy and American Institutions at ASU this semester, was anchor and managing editor of NewsNight on CNN from 2001 to November 2005. During his 30-year career, he covered the Vietnam protests, Watergate, the beginning of the Iraq war and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. On the air one-half hour after the first attack on the World Trade Center, Brown delivered his broadcast from a rooftop in lower Manhattan. His coverage earned him the coveted Edward R. Murrow Award. He also is the winner of three Emmys, a DuPont, two New York Film Society World medals and a George Foster Peabody Award. As a part of the faculty of both the Cronkite School and the Barrett Honors College, Brown taught an honors seminar, “Turning Points in Television News History,” with Cronkite School Professor William Silcock. The course covered pivotal moments in the history of TV news – everything from Murrow’s earliest TV reports and the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. He also delivered a major public lecture on the state of American journalism last month, attended by nearly 500 people. Cronkite Dean Christopher Callahan said he is delighted that Brown will deliver the parting words to the school’s approximately 190 graduates. “Aaron proved to be a gifted instructor, and I suspect that his convocation remarks will be remembered by our graduates for years to come,” Callahan said. The speaker for the Cronkite School’s December convocation was Ken Lowe, president and CEO of the E.W. Scripps Co.