CNN’s Bernard Shaw, long regarded as the last neutral anchor in TV news, has signed off at the age of 82. Of Shaw, Sen. John McCain famously said “I cannot tell you whether Bernie is a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or vegetarian.”
Now, 21 years after Shaw’s retirement from CNN in 2001, the network is struggling to get back to those standards.
Shaw, the son of a house painter and a housekeeper in Chicago, was shaped by his father’s habit of bringing home four newspapers every day. The young Shaw devoured those papers, learning journalism at the dinner table. Born in May 1940, he grew up in a segregated city. He went on to serve honorably in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, at a time when wealthy Chicagoans were protesting the draft.
