Anchors & Reporters
Miles O'Brien

Miles O'Brien is CNN's chief technology and environment correspondent. Based in New York, O'Brien has anchored various newscasts for CNN and Headline News including Live From and most recently American Morning. In February 2008, O'Brien reported for "Broken Government: Scorched Earth," an investigation into how money and politics can create environmental challenges and how citizens, corporations and state governments bypass the gridlock to find solutions.

O'Brien contributed to CNN's Peabody-award winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its afterman with live reports across the U.S. Gulf Coast. In February 2003, O'Brien led CNN's coverage of the Columbia Space Shuttle tragedy, offering viewers exclusive information and uniquely insightful context based on his years of professional experience with and study of NASA and space exploration. The day after the disaster, O'Brien traveled from Atlanta to Houston, where he continued his in-depth reporting from Johnson Space Center. Later in the year, O'Brien anchored much of the network's coverage of the war in Iraq.

Additionally, he has covered such stories as John Glenn's return to space on Oct. 29, 1998, during which he shared the anchor desk with broadcast news pioneer Walter Cronkite. An instrument-rated pilot with several hundred hours of flight time in a dozen types of aircraft, O'Brien covers all aspects of manned spaceflight, as well as unmanned scientific missions. In the fall of 1999, he led CNN's coverage of the demise of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, O'Brien used his flight experience to provide viewers simulated walk-through coverage of the hijacked flights as well as other reports about military action, especially as it pertained to combat aviation.

O'Brien reports extensively on civil aviation issues as well, covering the crash investigations of, US Air 427, TWA 800, Egyptair 990 American 587 and the accidents that took the lives of John F. Kennedy Jr., Payne Stewart and Sen. Paul Wellstone.

In the fall of 2000, he provided a series of acclaimed live and taped reports from Russia and Kazakhstan coinciding with the launch of the first multinational crew to live aboard the international space station. In 2000, he produced, shot and wrote a one-hour documentary on the intricate, sometimes-perilous process of readying a space shuttle for flight. "Terminal Count: What it Takes to Make the Space Shuttle Fly" aired in May 2001. Previously, he was anchor and correspondent for CNN's Science Unit, producing various stories for air during CNN's daily programming, as well as writing and hosting the weekly broadcast CNN Science & Technology Week. Before joining CNN in April 1992, O'Brien was a general assignment reporter and anchor at TV stations in Boston, Tampa, Albany, N.Y., and St. Joseph, Mo. He began his broadcast career in 1982 as an assignment editor at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C.

In 2002, O'Brien won the Space Communicator Award from the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement for outstanding media coverage of space reporting. O'Brien was part of the team that received a National Headliner Award for investigative coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2002 and a News and Documentary Emmy Award for CNN’s coverage of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for a 1994 documentary on post-Cold War technology conversion in the United States and Russia, as well as a local Emmy Award in 1989 for reports that exposed an emerging youth gang crisis in Boston. He also won a local Emmy Award in 1985 for reports on a chlorine gas leak in St. Petersburg, Fla.

O'Brien attended Georgetown University.

 

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