CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT SLATED TO ADDRESS DECEMBER GRADUATES SUNDAY
CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston will deliver the address at Old Dominion University's Dec. 17 commencement. The program will begin at 1:30 p.m. in Norfolk Scope.
Students who completed their degree requirements in August and December will participate in the ceremony. This includes 2,036 undergraduates and 1,135 graduate students.
The ceremony also will include the presentation of an honorary doctor of humane letters degree to Tim Miller, president of ACS Systems and Engineering Inc. in Virginia Beach.
Pinkston, who has been a New York-based CBS News correspondent since 1994, reports regularly for the "CBS Evening News" and "CBS News Sunday Morning" and has contributed to other network broadcasts, including "48 Hours."
He has covered many major stories of the past decade for CBS News, including the Albanian refugee crisis in Kosovo and the U.S. military participation in the Balkans; Saddam Hussein's refusal to allow U.N. inspection officers to enter Iraq; the U.S. intervention in Haiti; the Susan Smith trial, during which he broke the story of her arrest and landed the first interview with her ex-husband, David Smith; the Freemen siege in Montana; and the Unabomber story.
Pinkston received a 1996 Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism and the Edward R. Murrow Award for his reporting on the CBS Reports documentary "Legacy of Shame." He also won two other Emmy Awards: in 1998 for coverage of the death of Princess Diana and in 1997 for coverage of the TWA Flight 800 disaster.
Prior to his New York assignment, Pinkston was based in CBS News' Washington, D.C., bureau, where he joined the network as a White House correspondent (1990-94) one month before the start of the Persian Gulf war.
Elected in 1998 as a trustee of the Old Dominion University Intercollegiate Foundation, Tim Miller has contributed substantially to the university, most recently a $1 million bequest to support the University Village project and baseball program and a $3 million planned gift, in the form of a charitable trust, for athletics. Miller's company underwrites the university's annual Baseball Clinic.