Press Release
David O'Connor
New Era Staff Writer
NBC New Veteran Explains Link Between good Reporting, Teaching
Robert Hager says he always has felt that "new reporting is really teaching... If they don't understand it, what good is it?"
He expressed that sentiment just after Millersville University showed a film clip of Hager, the long-time, award-winning corespondent for NBC News, doing just that.
In the clip he explained how a storm surge after last year's Hurricane Ivan was more dangerous than the hurricane's initial rain and wind. He interviewed experts. He gave history. He painted the picture of what the sotrm had done.
Which is why Hager, during his appearance at MU's Gordinier Hall on Wednesday, was awarded the first-ever "Award for Excellence" from Millersville's Center for Disaster Research & Education.
"you knew that if they were watching Bob Hager, that was goot news," said MU professor and CDRE director Henry Fischer. "Because he's an example of the good that the media can do."
The award will join the two Emmys and two Edward R. Murrow Awards won by Hager, who retired last November from NBC and spoke to some 100 people Wednesday in Gordinier's Lehr Room.
He talked about being behind the Iron Curtain in Moscow, about eating a piece of paper with a man's name on it in Iron Curtain-era Poland, saving the man from gulag.
But Hager really made his reputation covering disasters, both natural and man-made.
He always preferred the investigative aspects of a disaster rather than dwelling on the suffering, he said.
"I was always struck by the contrast between these ugly events - wreckage, broken lives - in these tranquil settings, because nobody chooses where a plane is going to come down," he said.
Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland four days before Chistmas in 1988, and NBS set up its editing and camera gear in the back room of a pub.
NBS Nightly Nes is on at 6:30 P.m. East Coast time, which is 11:30 at night in the British Isles, so "one of my jobs was to keep our tape editors (from London) out of the bar until we went on the air," he said.
Best known for covering air disasters, he also saw his share of hurricanes, snowstorms and floods. He slept on floors and packed MREs, knowing that food would be scarce at the disaster scenes.
A 1960 Dartmouth College graduate, Hager worked for NBC for 35 years and got his feet wet in Vietnam in 1969.
Wednesday, he read from one of his dispatches from that time, a poetic piece describing for the awful destructiveness of the war was clear from the air, with huge bomb craters, Agent Orange-defoliated jungles and emptied villages.
But easily the biggest story of his career came the day he was on his way to Capital Hill for a routine news conference and he heard a report about a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers.
Like most people, he at first thought a plane had gotten lost.
He spent the day on the air, and 9/11 wound up being "certainly the most inportant story that I've ever covered, and a story that's changed the way we all live."
Hager also covered the summer 2004 tornado in Campbelltown.
WGAL-TV anchorwoman Janelle Stelson called Hager "extremely gracious," and commended him for his kindness and thank-yous to the Lancaster station for the help it gave NBC after Campbelltown.
Pennsylvania also was the scene of the happiest story Hager ever covered, the rescue of the nine miners trapped underground three years ago. He had covered his share of mine disasters, "and I was sure those fellas were goners."
When he ecided to retire, Hager said, he had lost none of his energy for covering the world, but thought, at age 66, it was time to "pass the torch" and spend more time with his wife, Honore, and family.
They have three daughters and five grandchildren.
