Backgrounder: Peter Klein
Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is one of many insurgents to fiercely oppose U.S forces and their occupation of Iraq. Most Americans wouldn’t feel comfortable being in the same room as al-Sadr, let alone striking up a conversation with him.
But Peter Klein, a producer for CBS News’ 60 Minutes, has been the only Western journalist to do just that. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, he traveled to Iraq and interviewed al-Sadr.
Klein is most famous for his documentary work. He won his first Emmy Award in 1996 as a contributing producer for the Learning Channel’s Killer Virus, a special report about Hepatitis C.
From 1997 to 1999, he was a producer for ABC’s Law and Justice Unit, where he investigated the wrongful imprisonment of a woman from Rochester, N.Y. His findings contributed to her release from prison and earned him an Emmy nomination.
Since 1999, Klein has been working alongside Mike Wallace at CBS, where he won another Emmy in 2001 for his pre-Sept. 11 report on the use of smallpox as a biological weapon.
“Our purpose there,” Klein told WNYC, “… was to alert the public and to alert officials that doctors need to be trained to notice smallpox, that we need to realize that this is a threat out there.”
His contribution to a two-part series about John F. Nash’s struggle with schizophrenia - whose story was also portrayed by Russell Crowe in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind - earned him yet another Emmy nomination in 2003.
In 1990, Klein graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in philosophy. He then worked as a freelance foreign correspondent in countries such as Haiti, Bosnia, Hungary, Romania and Serbia, and reported for papers like The Christian Science Monitor. In 1993, he received his master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, where he now teaches reporting and newsmagazine production to graduate journalism students.
Klein, a jazz pianist who is fluent in Hungarian, also worked as an international assignment editor for The New York Times’ video news until he started his first job at CBS in 1996, where he was a senior producer for I-Witness.
He has also produced programs like Doctor-Assisted Suicide, where he spent nine months recording a dying man’s journey for ABC’s Nightline, and Israel Channel 8’s West Bank Diary, in which he documented an American family’s move to Israel.
From 1999 to 2004, he was an adjunct professor at New York University, and on March 31, he will be coming back to talk about his experiences as an investigative journalist and life at CBS in the wake of the forged document scandal.