After more than 40 years in TV news, first at local stations in Boston and New York and later at ABC News, CBS News, and most recently, NBC News, Mike Taibbi is leaving the business.
Taibbi, 65, joined NBC News in 1997 as a correspondent for “Dateline NBC.” Prior to that he was a correspondent for CBS’ “48 Hours,” and before that he was a London-based correspondent for ABC News.
Taibbi, the father of author/journalist Matt Taibbi, reports for all NBC News broadcasts. He spent months in the middle east covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. More recently he was the lead correspondent on several big domestic stories, including the movie theater massacre in Aurora, CO, the Michael Jackson trial and the Gabby Giffords shooting.
Taibbi began his career in television in 1971 as a reporter for WCVB-TV in Boston. He also worked as an investigative reporter for WNAC-TV in Boston, and at two New York stations: WNBC and WCBS.
In a note to colleagues (after the jump), obtained by TVNewser, Taibbi writes, “My time as a television reporter may have lasted only this long but it’s the stories I’ve loved without pause, all these decades, not the fact that I got to tell them on television.”
To my friends and colleagues:
It occurred to me a few weeks ago, turning 65, that I’d had a by-line as a reporter for just about half a century. In print at first and then, for more than four decades, on television.
And on television, in these years at NBC, I got to work with magicians: editors, shooters, producers, graphics wizards and others who could routinely turn a two minute spot or a Dateline hour into a whole so much bigger than the sum of its parts. All I had to do was offer my limited contribution…the best reporting and writing I could come up with…and the team did the rest. Pure joy.
In his novel “Mile Zero,” Thomas Sanchez wrote “Nothing lasts forever…not even eternal love.” I always liked the lyrical irony in that line but I think now Sanchez was wrong: my time as a television reporter may have lasted only this long but it’s the stories I’ve loved without pause, all these decades, not the fact that I got to tell them on television. And the stories will always be there… be there forever… and I mean to tell as many as I can, for as long as I can, in any ways I can.
I’m a sailor, heading off watch for the first time in a long time on a passage I’ve been privileged to share with so many of you.
Fair winds to all of us, as our respective journeys continue.
Mike