Cynthia McFadden, the TV-news veteran whose career has taken her from co-anchoring ABC News‘ “Nightline” to a senior perch on NBC News‘ investigations team, is stepping away from broadcast journalism.
“It is hard to leave a job you love but this is the right time — I have a list of things I have often said I wanted to do ‘someday’. Well, someday is now, while I am still raring to go — and playing with a relatively full deck,” McFadden said in a note to colleagues Friday. Maybe I’ll even surprise you (and myself!)”
Her work at NBC News has taken the veteran correspondent to Central Africa to report on a humanitarian crisis to Camp Lejeune, where she probed why veteran U.S. Marines and wives and daughters stationed at the North Carolina training facility lost babies after being exposed to toxic water. A one-hour special report on that topic appeared last week on the live-streaming service NBC News Now.
Over the course of a three-decade career, McFadden has been able to both travel the world to investigate humanitarian crises and human slavery and to explore issues of justice and national security. She joined ABC News in February 1994 as a legal correspondent after logging a stint as the executive producer of Fred Friendly’s Media and Society seminars based at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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In October of 2005, she was named co-anchor of “Nightline” after Ted Koppel stepped down from his founding stint as the face of the program. McFadden had on occasion filled in for him and took some of the reins of the late-night news program as it worked to keep up with modern audiences and sometimes tackled lifestyle topics and celebrity interviews. She also covered sizzling legal cases involving O.J. Simpson and Martha Stewart.
NBC offered her a chance to tackle even bigger topics. “It was a big decision to leave ABC after 20 years — to give up the ‘Nightline’ anchor chair and hit the road. But the opportunity at NBC to dig deeply into some of the world’s most complex problems was just too good to resist,” McFadden said in her note. “I am so happy I took the leap. These have been some of the most gratifying and productive years in a long career. NBC encouraged me to tell complex and nuanced stories — often about injustice and corruption, especially about the troubles children face — from rural Mississippi to the Triangle of death in the Central African Republic — from the Red Cloud reservation to the mica mines of Madagascar and the mothers of Camp Lejeune. From the American Arctic and the Rohingya camps to the Peruvian gold mines and cancer alley. Sometimes the stories led to hearings, federal investigations or policy changes. Sometimes we were able to give a voice to someone who had never had one.”
Her work over the years has at various times earned a Peabody Award, an Emmy and a Loeb Award.
