R.I.P.: Ray Brady, Former CBS News Correspondent

Ray Brady

Ray Brady, an award-winning CBS News correspondent who covered business, economics and Wall Street on CBS Television and Radio for 28 years, died in his sleep Tuesday in his Manhattan apartment after a long illness.  He was 94, according to CBS.

He appeared regularly for 23 years on the CBS EVENING NEWS until his retirement in 2000. He also contributed to SUNDAY MORNING and the various weekday CBS News morning broadcasts over his tenure. Brady also reported for CBS News online for “MarketWatch,” the financial news website. He was interim host on the long-running PBS program “Wall Street Week” in the summer of 2000.

Upon Brady’s retirement, Andrew Heyward, then-president of the News Division, said: “Ray's deep knowledge of his field, his powerful sense of integrity, his genuine interest in the people he met along the way, and his unflagging passion for the next story make him a great reporter. He was a pioneer who brought Wall Street home to Main Street with grace, humor, and wisdom. The men and women who cover the markets today stand on his shoulders.”

As the CBS News economics correspondent, Brady covered nearly all the big business stories of the Seventies and Eighties, including the Crash of 1987, at the time the steepest one-day market crash in history.  Brady foreign stories included the financial impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Japan’s “science cities,” and oil and politics in the Middle East.

Brady won an Emmy Award for 1982 for a series of reports on the “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather” on unemployed Americans in the recession.  He won the Personal Finance Journalism award from American University in 1998 for his two-part series, “Secrets of the IRS,” also broadcast on the “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.”  He was a former governor of the New York Financial Writers Association.

Brady joined CBS in New York at News Radio 880 in 1972, while he was still Editor at Dun’s Review, a publication of Dun and Bradstreet. He could be heard on features like “Today in Business” and “Your Dollars.”   He moved over to the CBS local television station WCBS-TV as business editor in 1976.