Anthony Mason is a senior culture and senior national correspondent for CBS News. One of the most experienced and versatile correspondents in television news, he is an 11 time Emmy Award winner.
He was a co-host of “CBS This Morning” (now “CBS Mornings”) from 2019-2021 and prior to that was a co-host of “CBS This Morning: Saturday” (now “CBS Saturday Morning”) for seven years. He has interviewed Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon.
Mason is perhaps best known for his interviews with many of the most prominent musicians of our time including Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Al Green, Adele, Lady Gaga, Pharrell Williams, Cher, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Mason’s story on Glen Campbell’s battle with Alzheimer’s, while the singer was still on tour, won an Emmy in 2013.
In 2022, he landed the first interview with Joni Mitchell after she overcame a brain aneurism and performed at the Newport Folk Festival.
He has also profiled performers Jerry Seinfeld, Jeff Goldblum, Emily Blunt, Kate Winslet and Scarlett Johansson.
Mason began his career at CBS News in 1986 and quickly made a mark as a journalist reporting from around the globe. In 1989, he was the first journalist to report on the exodus of East German refugees through Hungary as the Iron Curtain began to crack. He followed the story to Czechoslovakia and Poland as their communist governments collapsed. Mason’s work on the story won him the prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award presented to CBS News for its coverage of Eastern Europe.
From 1991 to 1993, Mason was CBS News’ chief Moscow correspondent, where he reported on the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, the rise of Boris Yeltsin and the demise of the Soviet Union, coverage which also won him an Emmy Award.
Mason was CBS News’ business correspondent from 1998 to 2016. His series “Life and Debt in America,” which aired on the “CBS Evening News” in early 2008, won him another Emmy.
In addition to the Emmy Awards, his series on crime writers — he profiled more than 40 of them over a decade — won the Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America. And he won a James Beard Award for “The Dish” segment on “CBS Saturday Morning.”
In 2022, New York’s City Parks Foundation honored Mason with the SummerStage Icon Award for his significant contributions to the arts. In 2023, he was inducted into the New York Journalism Hall of Fame.
Mason was born in New York City and is a graduate of St. George’s School and Georgetown University (B.A. 1980). He and his wife, Christina, have three children.