Background
Sawyer was born and reared in Lakeland, Florida, where he graduated from Kathleen High School.
founder justice broadcast journalist
Sawyer was born and reared in Lakeland, Florida, where he graduated from Kathleen High School.
University of Florida.
Sawyer worked 11 years with American Broadcasting Company News, where he frequently anchored American Broadcasting Company World News Tonight and Nightline and reported for all American Broadcasting Company News broadcasts. He left American Broadcasting Company News in 1999 to become a news anchor for both National Broadcasting Company and its cable counterpart, Microsoft and National Broadcasting Company, where he was a regular substitute for Brian Williams as anchor for The News with Brian Williams. After starting in radio, Sawyer moved into television with Atlanta"s WAGA-television, a Columbia Broadcasting System affiliate (currently a Fox owned-and-operated station) from 1980 to 1985.
Sawyer, Don Smith, and photographer George Gentry were cited for a documentary in which viewers were "treated to a quality of visual beauty not often seen on television and, at the same time, were informed, enlightened, and challenged concerning the problems of retaining a great natural heritage and a diminishing resource—the unspoiled beauty of the Atlantic Coast."
From August 1985 to August 1986, Sawyer and Maria Shriver were anchors of The Columbia Broadcasting System Morning News.
Sawyer stayed with Columbia Broadcasting System until 1987. He joined American Broadcasting Company in 1988 as anchorman of American Broadcasting Company World News This Morning and also hosted "World News Sunday" and "Day One." He hosted Justice Files on The Discovery Channel in the early 1990s.
Sawyer filed the first in-depth network report on the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, was the first reporter to gain access to the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)"s files on Lee Harvey Oswald, and filed history"s first live television report from a battlefield during the First Gulf War. Sawyer also served as a regular substitute anchor on the American Broadcasting Company News programs World News Tonight and Nightline before leaving American Broadcasting Company and joining National Broadcasting Company. Sawyer played himself as moderator in "The Debate" an episode of The West Wing which aired live and was dedicated solely to a debate between two fictitious presidential candidates.
He was a guest speaker at the American Association of Community Colleges Conference in Long Beach, California, during April 2006 and was keynote speaker on May 11, 2007 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a conference titled, "The Future of Multi-Media Digital News and Cultural Networks."
In late 2007, while filming a documentary in Tanzania, he survived a helicopter crash.
Sawyer rescued a Maasai villager from the wreckage, and, with an injured knee, carried another man several miles across a toxic lake to safety. His recent media appearances include anchoring the July 19, 2008 edition of the Columbia Broadcasting System Evening News. and reporting the 2009 Frontline documentary "Ten Trillion and Counting," a journey through the politics behind the national debt.
He was a member of Alpha Tau Omega at the University of Florida, where he earned a bachelor"s degree in Eastern philosophy and world religions and a master"s degree in education.