#ROGER MUDD TV#

Mudd also covered numerous political campaigns.

In 1964, Mudd became nationally known for covering the two-month filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, starting in late-March. Federal Court for libel, but the court dismissed the case. James Utt, a Republican of Santa Ana, California, about a rumor that Utt spread about Africans who were supposedly working with the United Nations to take over the United States. On November 13, 1963, CBS-TV broadcast the documentary Case History of a Rumor, in which Mudd interviewed Rep. During the Civil Rights Movement, Mudd anchored the August 28, 1963, coverage of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for CBS. Mudd was also the anchor of the Saturday edition of CBS Evening News and frequently substituted on the weekday and weeknight broadcasts when regular anchormen Douglas Edwards and Walter Cronkite were on vacation or working on special assignments. For most of his career at CBS, Mudd was a Congressional correspondent. Mudd quickly came to the attention of CBS News and moved 'downstairs' to join the Washington bureau on May 31, 1961. CBS News ĬBS News was located on the third floor of WTOP's studios at 40th and Brandywine in northwest Washington, D.C. Then in March 1959 WTOP replaced Don Richards with Mudd for its 11 p.m. The interview was with Dorothy Counts, a black teenage girl who had suffered racial harassment at her otherwise all-white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina.

#ROGER MUDD TV#

In September that year, Mudd conducted his first live TV studio interview. Mudd produced a half-hour TV documentary in summer 1957 advocating the need for a third airport in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area. newscast, that included a weekly commentary piece, all without 'the constraints of the wire service vocabulary'.

newscast for WTOP and he did local news segments on the local TV program Potomac Panorama.ĭuring the fall of 1956, Mudd hosted the first newscast he wrote, WTOP's 6:00 p.m. Although WTOP News was a local news department, it also covered national stories. In the late 1950s, Mudd moved to Washington, D.C., to become a reporter with WTOP News, the news division of the radio and television stations owned by Washington Post- Newsweek. (Photo by Douglas Martin, winner of 1958 World Press Photo of the Year) WTOP News ĭorothy Counts walks to school on her first day, amid jeers from other students. In the fall of 1954, Mudd enrolled in the University of Richmond School of Law, but dropped out after one semester. WRNL later gave Mudd his own daily broadcast, Virginia Headlines. Because Mudd failed to silence his microphone properly, an engineer intervened. In his memoir The Place to Be, Mudd describes an incident from his first day at WRNL in which he laughed hysterically on-air after mangling a news item about the declining health of Pope Pius XII, mispronouncing his name as 'Pipe Poeus'. Īt WRNL radio, Mudd presented the daily noon newscast. The News Leader ran its first story with a Mudd byline on June 19, 1953. At the News Leader, he worked at the rewrite desk during spring 1953 and became a summer replacement on June 15 that year. Mudd began his journalism career in Richmond, Virginia, as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader and for radio station WRNL. He was initiated as an alumnus member of Omicron Delta Kappa at Washington and Lee in 1966. Mudd was a member of Delta Tau Delta international fraternity. Mudd earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Washington and Lee University, where one of his classmates was author Tom Wolfe, in 1950, and a Master of Arts in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. Roger attended DC Public Schools and graduated from Wilson High School in 1945. His mother, Irma Iris Harrison, was the daughter of a farmer and was a nurse and lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps serving in the physiotherapy ward in the Walter Reed Hospital, where she met Roger's father. His father, John Kostka Dominic Mudd, was the son of a tobacco farmer and worked as a map maker for the United States Geological Survey.

Roger mudd