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Joe Schlesinger Print E-mail
Joe Schlesinger is a veteran Canadian journalist who for four decades has reported for CBC Television News from every corner of the world. He has covered wars from Vietnam to the Gulf, with many other conflicts in between.

Born in Vienna in 1928, Schlesinger was raised in Czechoslovakia. In 1939, after Hitler dismembered the country, Joe's parents sent him for safety to England. When he returned to Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II in 1945, he found his parents had been killed in The Holocaust.

Joe started his journalistic career in 1948 in the Prague bureau of the Associated Press. When the communist rulers of Czechoslovakia started arresting AP staffers, he fled across the Iron Curtain and came to Canada.

He became a reporter at the Vancouver Province and the Toronto Star, then an editor at the UPI bureau in London, England, and at the European Herald Tribune in Paris.

In 1966, he joined the CBC in Toronto. He served both as executive producer of The National and head of CBC TV News. In 1970, Schlesinger went overseas again, this time as the CBC's Far East correspondent based in Hong Kong. This was followed over the next 20 years by postings to Paris, Washington and Berlin. In 1991 he became the CBC's Chief Political Correspondent in Ottawa. Joe retired from the CBC news service in 1994, but has continued to contribute regularly to CBC programs.

A book of Schlesinger's memoirs, "Time Zones," was published in 1990 and became a best-seller. He won four Gemini awards, the John Drainie award for distinguished contribution to Canadian broadcasting and a Hot Doc award for documentary writing. “The Power of Good,” a documentary he wrote and narrated, won an International Emmy award in 2002.

In 1994, he was named a member of the Order of Canada. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of British Columbia, The Royal Military College and Dalhousie University. He has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation.  He recently received two more honorary degrees from Queen’s and Carleton.