The NCAA News - News and Features

December 15, 1997

Roberts named master of ceremonies for honors dinner

Television news anchor John Roberts will serve as master of ceremonies for the 1998 NCAA honors dinner January 11 at the NCAA Convention in Atlanta.

Roberts anchors the CBS News Sunday edition. He also works as a New York-based correspondent, contributing reports for CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

During the 1996 Summer Olympic Games, Roberts was one of the first television news reporters to report live from the scene of the bombing. He reported with live coverage nearly 11 hours from a rooftop overlooking the scene. He also anchored breaking coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing, two years to the day after he had anchored special reports from the fire of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

Roberts' reporting experience includes live on-site coverage of the Northridge, California, earthquake; fires in Laguna Beach and Malibu, California; Hurricanes Hugo, Andrew and Felix; and the U.S. intervention in Haiti and the Cuban refugee crisis in Miami. His international assignments have included reporting from Nicaragua, Brazil, Jamaica, Japan, Britain, France and Switzerland. Roberts has interviewed many prominent newsmakers, including President Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore, Yitzhak Rabin, Boris Yeltsin and Benazir Bhutto.

In 1994, Roberts won a New York Press Club Award for his coverage of the 1994 elections and the New York City subway fire-bombing as co-anchor for WCBS-TV in New York.

He joined CBS News in June 1992 as co-anchor of CBS Morning News. Prior to that, Roberts co-anchored "Canada-A.M.," CTV's top-rated morning news program, and was an anchor-correspondent at WCIX-TV in Miami. He previously was a co-anchor for "City Wide" and "City Pulse" at City TV in Toronto.

Roberts was born in Toronto and attended the University of Toronto.