Anthony Mason

Anthony Mason, 59, is host of CBS This Morning: Saturday and CBS News’ Senior National Correspondent. He is also a frequent contributor of cultural stories to the CBS News Sunday Morning broadcast. Mason has spent more than 35 years as a television journalist. In three decades as a correspondent for CBS News, he has reported from more than 30 countries and won nine Emmy Awards.
 
Born in New York City, Mason moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma after graduating from Georgetown University in 1980 to take a job at KJRH-TV. That led to stints at WCAU in Philadelphia and WCBS in New York, He joined CBS News in 1986.
 
Assigned to the London Bureau from 1987-1990, Mason traveled extensively for the next four years. He went into Afghanistan with the Mujahedeen guerillas to cover the Soviet pullout; reported from Pakistan on the assassination of General Zia ul Haq and the rise of Benazir Bhutto; and went to the front in the Iran-Iraq war to witness Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons on the Kurds. He also covered the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
 
In 1989, he was the first journalist to report on the exodus of East German refugees through Hungary as the Iron Curtain began to crack. He followed the story to Czechoslovakia and Poland as their communist governments collapsed. His work earned Mason the prestigious DuPont Columbia Award.
 
From 1991 to 1993, Mason was CBS News’ chief Moscow correspondent, where he reported on the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, the rise of Boris Yeltsin and the demise of the Soviet Union, coverage which won him an Emmy Award.
 
Mason was named Business Correspondent in 1998. His series, “Life and Debt in America,” which aired on the CBS Evening News in early 2008, underscored some of the problems that ultimately led to the financial crisis and won him and another Emmy. At the end of 2008, the business website Marketwatch.com named him the “Broadcast journalist of the year.” Marketwatch.com’s media critic wrote that Mason “personified a dying art in the media today: explanatory journalism. Night after night, Mason took pains to help his viewers understand what was unfolding on Wall Street and in Washington – and, most important, why they should care.”
 
As a regular contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning, Mason hosts the program’s annual Money show. He has also profiled politicians (Bill Clinton), business leaders (Henry Paulson), and musicians (Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards.) His series on crime writers (he profiled more than 40 of them over a decade) won the Raven award from the Mystery Writers of America.
 
For the past decade, Mason has also been involved in election coverage for CBS providing exit poll analysis during the primaries and on election night.  Anthony Mason is a graduate of St. George’s School and Georgetown University (B.A. 1980) He and his wife, Christina have 3 children and live in New York City.