Mike Walter
Principal Anchor of CGTN-America
About Speaker
Mike Walter is a five time Emmy award winning broadcast journalist. He currently serves as general news anchor on the nightly CGTN-America News hour. For two years he also hosted CGTN-America’s flagship weekly talk show, “The Heat”. The 39th U.S. President Jimmy Carter, legendary U.S. broadcaster Tom Brokaw, U.S. Senator Carl Levin, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and multiple Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman were among those interviewed by Walter. In April of 2014 Walter cycled off the Heat and began hosting a new one hour weekly talk show. “Full Frame” has featured interviews with Bill Gates, Yo Yo Ma, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Herbie Hancock, and Deepak Chopra. Walter has won a number of prestigious honors during his 20 plus years as a broadcast journalist. In 2010, Walter won the Ted Yates Memorial award, a special Emmy only given by unanimous vote of the board of directors of the Washington Chapter of the National Academy of the Television Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Walter became the only local broadcast news anchor to ever win the coveted Dart Ochberg Fellowship. Before joining CGTN-America, Walter enjoyed worldwide attention for his first independent documentary project, “Breaking News, Breaking Down”. The film was selected as one of the three best documentary shorts by Moving Pictures magazine. It was also chosen as Best Documentary Short at the Cannes Independent Film Festival, one of six awards the film collected before it was bought by PBS. Profiles on Walter and the film have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, and Journalistan (A magazine devoted to journalists in Sweden) and the Australian. The film has screened in close to a dozen countries. Walter witnessed the Pentagon attack in 2001 while working as Senior Correspondent at USA TODAY LIVE. He shared his first person account of watching the 9/11 attack with the BBC, CBS, CNN, and the Canadian Broadcasting Network. He also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, and his 9/11 story was featured in People Magazine. In addition, Walter was a key contributor to two books about the 9/11 attacks, “Broadcasting through Crisis”, and “Covering Catastrophe”. In addition part of his oral history of the attack is part of the collection on display at the 9/11 Memorial Museum which opened in May of 2014.