R.I.P.: Mitchell Krauss, Former CBS News Correspondent

Mitchell Krauss

Mitchell Krauss, a Middle East correspondent for CBS News who was wounded in the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, died on January 27 at Northern Dutchess Hospital in New York, near his home in Rhinebeck. He was 90 and died from kidney failure, reports Deadline.com.

Krauss was the correspondent and the bureau chief in Cairo during a 25-year career at CBS News. On October 6, 1981, he was covering a military parade and was near enough to the Egyptian leader to suffer a shrapnel wound to his leg in the grenade and automatic weapons attack that killed Sadat.

One of only a few reporters on the scene, he was able to file an audio report that was broadcast later as part of a CBS Special Report on the assassination. Krauss then managed to get on a flight to Rome with the CBS videotape of the event before the Cairo airport was shut down.

Krauss served as a CBS news correspondent on television and radio from 1972 to 1997.  In the 1990s, he appeared mostly on radio, anchoring hourly national news reports and the daily CBS World News Roundup.

Krauss joined CBS News from Channel 13, the PBS station in New York, where he was a news correspondent and the host of the late-evening Newsfront, America’s first non-commercial, live daily news program, syndicated on several PBS stations.

Before that, he could be heard internationally on Radio New York Worldwide. In the 1950s, he began his career in news broadcasting in local radio in New York at WQXR, and then in Philadelphia at WFLN and WIP.