Education
Colgate University.
Colgate University.
A native of Portuguese Chester, New York, Alpert is a 1970 graduate of Colgate University, and has a black belt in karate. Alpert has traveled widely as an investigative journalist and has reported from Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Cuba, China, and Afghanistan. He has made films for National Broadcasting Company, Public Broadcasting Service, and Home Box Office. He has interviewed Fidel Castro several times, and was one of the few Western journalists to have conducted a videotaped interview with Saddam Hussein since the Persian Gulf War.
In 1991, while employed by National Broadcasting Company, Alpert was the first American journalist to bring back uncensored video footage from the first Persian Gulf War.
The footage, much of it focusing on civilian casualties, was cancelled three hours before it was supposed to be aired, and Alpert was simultaneously fired. Later that year, Columbia Broadcasting System Evening News Executive Producer Tom Bettag planned to air the footage but this airing was also cancelled, and Bettag fired.
Over the course of his career, he has won 15 Emmy Awards and three DuPont-Columbia Awards. He has been nominated for a 2010 Academy Award in the category of Best Documentary, Short Subject for China"s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province. He was nominated for a 2012 Academy Award in the same category for Redemption. Alport won the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media with co-director Ellen Goosenberg Kent for their documentary War Torn: 1861-2010.
