Printable Biography of John Hockenberry

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Three-time Peabody Award winner, four-time Emmy award winner and Dateline NBC correspondent, John Hockenberry has broad experience as a journalist and commentator for more than two decades. He has reported from all over the world, in virtually every medium, having anchored programs for network, cable and radio. Hockenberry was responsible for two of the most innovative programs to air on MSNBC. The program “Hockenberry’ was a smart provocative news interview program which broadcast live from the war in Kosovo in 1999, while “Edgewise” was a unique blend of raw documentary filmaking and interviews with newsmakers passionate about politics and culture.

Hockenberry joined NBC as a correspondent for Dateline NBC in January 1996 after a fifteen-year career in broadcast news at both National Public Radio and ABC News. Hockenberry's reporting for Dateline NBC earned him three Emmys, an Edward R Murrow award and a Casey Medal. His most prominent Dateline NBC reports include an hour-long documentary on the often-fatal tragedy of the medically uninsured, an emotionally gripping portrait of a young schizophrenic trying to live on his own, and extensive reporting in the aftermath of September 11th.

His programs have illuminated issues and events from corporate downsizing and the new face of homelessness to the mysterious world of Saudi Arabia post 9/11. Hockenberry obtained the first television interview with a family member of two of the terrorist hijackers in Saudi Arabia. His investigative work has scrutinized pharmaceutical industry scandals and discrimination against people with disabilities in employment and housing.

Hockenberry is also the author of “A River Out Of Eden” a novel based in the Pacific Northwest, and "Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence," a memoir of life as a foreign correspondent which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. In 1996, Hockenberry performed a successful limited run of "Spokeman," a one-man, off-Broadway show he also wrote. He has also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, I.D., Wired, The Columbia Journalism Review, Details, and The Washington Post.

Previously, Hockenberry served as a correspondent for the ABC newsmagazine, "Day One" (1993-95), where he won his first Emmy and contributed on a wide range of stories, including investigative pieces on NASA, a chillingly prescient story on the implications of chaos in Afghanistan, as well as the first network interview with controversial Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Prior to that, Hockenberry spent more than a decade with NPR as a general assignment reporter, Middle East correspondent and host of several programs. During the Persian Gulf War (1990-91), Hockenberry was assigned to the Middle East, where he filed reports from Israel, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. He was one of the first Western broadcast journalists to report from Kurdish refugee camps in Northern Iraq and Southern Turkey. Hockenberry also spent two years (1988-90) as a correspondent based in Jerusalem during the most intensive conflict of the Palestinian uprising. Hockenberry received the Columbia Dupont Award for Foreign News Coverage for reporting on the Gulf War.

Hockenberry served as anchor of "Talk of the Nation," a daily two-hour live call-in show from Washington D.C. He anchored the broadcast from its premiere in November 1991.He’s a regular contributor to the award-winning radio program: The Infinite Mind and had been the Anchor and co-writer for the award winning NPR series “The DNA Files” produced by SoundVision productions, a winner of the Peabody and the Robert Wood Johnson Peabody and a Columbia Dupont.

In 1987, Hockenberry joined NPR where he won his first Peabody Award, while hosting NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday," for a profile of a young man permanently injured during a drive-by shooting. He received his second Peabody Award in 1990, for his work on "Heat," a daily, two-hour public affairs program Hockenberry helped create, co-produce and host.

Hockenberry's other broadcasting honors also include the 1984 and 1985 Champion Tuck Business Reporting Awards, the 1985 Benton Fellowship in broadcast Journalism, and the 1987 Unity in Media Award. He was named one of 40 "Journalist in Space" semifinalists in 1986.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Hockenberry grew up in upstate New York and Michigan, and attended both the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon.

Hockenberry and his wife, Alison, live in New York City with their children, Zoe, Olivia, Zachary and Regan: two sets of twins... but who’s counting.