Obituary: Longtime television journalist Roger Mudd, 93, has died. For many years he worked for CBS News, based in Washington. He died of complications from kidney failure.
He began his career in Richmond, Virginia, in the 1950s and went on from there to the big leagues. He was a very good reporter of the old school. He wasn't any tabloid trash like the UK's infamous Piers Morgan, who has also been in the news as of late.
But Mudd left CBS for rival NBC News after the weeknight anchor chair was awarded to Dan Rather - a move CBS said it made to keep Rather from accepting a big ABC News contract - following Cronkite’s retirement in 1981.
Mudd served briefly as co-anchor with Tom Brokaw of “NBC Nightly News” before Brokaw took over as sole anchor of the broadcast in 1983. Mudd then joined PBS’ “The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour” in 1987 as a political commentator and reporter.
In 1992, he began teaching at Princeton and Washington and Lee universities while going to work for the History Channel, retiring in 2004 after 10 years as its principal on-air host.
Mudd was distantly related to Dr. Samuel Mudd, a Maryland physician imprisoned as a conspirator in the 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln after treating John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg hours after the actor fatally shot the president.
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