Legendary newswoman to retire from host chair of This Week in Northern California after almost two decades.
This Week will continue broadcast with guest hosts until new host is announced in early 2013.
Belva Davis, the award-winning host of KQED Public Television’s weekly public affairs program This Week in Northern California, will helm her final broadcast on Friday, November 9, 2012, at 7:30pm. The program will feature an interview with one of the great voices of contemporary literature Maya Angelou, who, like Davis, has had an immense impact on the advancement of civil rights through her work as a poet, educator, historian, and best-selling author. Davis will also lead a roundtable discussion and analysis of the election results with noted Bay Area journalists. For more information on This Week and Belva Davis, please visit kqed.org/thisweek.
“I have enjoyed a unique and long career here in the Bay Area and have been witness to some of the most explosive stories of the last half century,” says Davis, who has received several dozen awards for her journalism, including eight local Emmys. “I’m truly thankful for the support of everyone at KQED and the loyalty of our audiences throughout my time on the air.”
“Belva Davis is an icon of fair, thorough and local journalism and she has opened up so many doors for women and African Americans in television and beyond,” said John Boland, KQED president. “We count ourselves lucky to have had such a trailblazer as part of the KQED family. We will continue our commitment to our weekly public affairs and news programming and will build on the insightful and thought-provoking coverage that Belva has so brilliantly led over the last two decades.”
It’s poignant that Davis’s acclaimed career spanning almost five decades will culminate with the 2012 election. She started her journalism career in 1964 covering Barry Goldwater’s nomination at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. Davis traveled to both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this year to provide coverage of the California delegations. She will be hosting the KQED Election Night Special, which airs Tuesday, November 6, at 9pm on KQED 9 immediately following the PBS NewsHour national coverage.
Davis was the first female African-American television journalist in the West and has reported on many of the most important stories of our time, including the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley,, the birth of the Black Panthers, the Peoples Temple cult that ended in mass suicides at Jonestown, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and the terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassy in Tanzania that first put Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. She has interviewed a wide-range of cultural icons, including Malcolm X, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Nancy Reagan, Huey Newton, Muhammad Ali, Alex Haley, Fidel Castro, Dianne Feinstein, Condoleeza Rice among others.
A tribute video highlighting Davis’s career has been produced by KQED and narrated by PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff. It is available to embed at goo.gl/Y5qWG.
This Week will continue its planned broadcast schedule with a series of guest hosts following November 9 until a new host is announced in early 2013.