Rick Sanchez

How do you take a kick in the pants and turn it into motivation? Ask Rick Sanchez. He was among the highest rated anchors in the news business. At CNN, he was producing and hosting not one, not two, but three hours of news a day. Then, one fateful day during an interview with an obscure satellite radio host, tired and frustrated, he said something he wishes he could take back, but he couldn't, not in the internet age of instant gotchas that devour celebrities and politicians alike. Instead, he got fired for it.

Today, Sanchez is a close friend and ally of arguably the most important Jewish organizations in the country, the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. He travels the country, working to strengthen ties between Jews and Hispanics. And he even has a trip to Israel in the works in association with the ADL's Abe Foxman.

Sanchez made a mistake. In trying to describe the lack of diversity in the news media, he inadvertently offended many Jewish Americans by scoffing at the notion that they too are an oppressed minority. It was an ill-advised comment for which Sanchez apologized, but still paid dearly. However, he didn't let it end there. Sanchez quietly set out to meet Jewish leaders and to better understand Jewish perspectives and sensitivities, to understand what Abe Foxman calls the "myths most people have about money and Jews."

Rick Sanchez has a story to tell. It's a story we can all use at one time or another. It's a story of falling down and getting up.

It's also the story of the first American network anchor to successfully employ social media, or as NPR reported in 2009, Rick "was tweeting before Twitter was cool." (Many of Sanchez's interviews with newsmakers have gone viral and can still be seen on YouTube; among his most notable: Fidel Castro, Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, and Manuel Noriega.) And it's the story of the first American network anchor to report for CNN in both Spanish and English.

When the Twin Towers came crashing down on 9/11, Rick Sanchez was there – reporting live as one of only a handful of national reporters who got to the scene in time to witness the second tower tumble to the ground. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans killing thousands, anchor Sanchez was the first to report live that the levees had broken. And the next day, correspondent Sanchez was on the scene reporting from an airboat as a principal part of CNN's Peabody award-winning coverage.

When Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida as the costliest natural disaster in US history, Sanchez was first on the scene, not only covering the event but organizing a national relief drive that saved lives by moving in tens of thousands of tons of food and supplies into the area. President George H.W. Bush and the Florida Broadcasters Association acknowledged him for his work.

Rick Sanchez has been a journalist, author, correspondent, and television news anchor for more than 25 years. He's been described as a "populist," a "fighter for the little guy," and a talent who "breaks through the television screen." He's reported on the Contra War from the jungles of Nicaragua where he was stricken with Malaria, the landing zone for Marines in the War in Grenada and the slums of Port Au Prince, Haiti where he almost lost his life.

He grew up in poverty to working parents who came to the United States from Cuba when he was just two years old. He learned to speak English in the Miami Dade Public School System and then went on to Moorhead State University on a Football Scholarship. He followed that up with an academic scholarship to study journalism at the University of Minnesota under the auspices of CBS News.