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May 10, 2007

"Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it." --Rabindranath Tagore

From Illiteracy to News Reporting

Byron Pitts was chatting with students at a Harlem charter school the day before a recent visit by President Bush, when the CBS correspondent had a realization: they viewed him as just another empty suit who couldn't possibly understand their problems. Little did they know. "When I was your age," he told them, "I couldn't read." CBS correspondent Byron Pitts, reporting from the Middle East in 2003, was illiterate when he was 12 years old. And it was no exaggeration. Officials at Baltimore's Archbishop Curley High School had summoned his mother to report that tests had determined her son to be "functionally illiterate." She broke into tears. How Pitts overcame that inauspicious start to excel in a profession built on writing and speaking is as good a story as any that he has covered.