Barry Petersen

In a career spanning more than three decades with CBS News, Barry Petersen has reported on everything from wars and natural disasters to Paris fashions and the return of American Jazz to Shanghai, China. His stories have been datelined from virtually every continent, and he has lived and worked in numerous global locations including Tokyo, Moscow, London, and Beijing, enhancing his reporting with a deep understanding of regional dynamics.

Petersen has interviewed Hollywood stars including Jimmy Stewart, Bill Cosby, Pierce Brosnan, and Sir Anthony Hopkins, as well as the leaders of the Bosnian war who were later tried as war criminals. He also met the President of the South Seas nation of Kiribati, who showed up for the interview barefoot. His extensive coverage of significant historical events includes the democracy uprising at Tiananmen Square, for which he received the George Foster Peabody Award and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award.

His war reporting includes being embedded with US soldiers in Iraq, covering the US military's Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and witnessing Soviet troops retreating from Afghanistan. Petersen's exceptional coverage of the Bosnian war and the courage of men, women, and children under fire in Sarajevo earned him one of his multiple Emmy Awards for "The Spirit of Sarajevo" on "CBS Sunday Morning." More recently, he has focused on economic and cultural reporting, as demonstrated by his 2010 Emmy-winning coverage of the global recession in China. Petersen's poignant "Sunday Morning" story about his wife Jan and Alzheimer's disease not only earned a national 2011 Edward R. Murrow Award but also led him to author "Jan's Story: A Love Lost to the Long Goodbye of Alzheimer's," a deeply personal account that has touched many families facing similar challenges.