| John Hockenberry |
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 |
| Born | John Charles Hockenberry
June 4, 1956 (age 61)
Dayton, Ohio, U.S. |
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| Education | Studied math at University of Chicago
Studied music at University of Oregon |
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| Occupation | Television journalist/Author |
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| Years active | 1980–present |
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| Notable credit(s) | HEAT with John Hockenberry, Talk of the Nation, ABC News, Dateline NBC, The Infinite Mind, Edgewise, Hockenberry, The Takeaway |
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| Spouse(s) | Alison Craiglow Hockenberry (1995-present) |
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| Children | 5 |
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Hockenberry has reported from all over the world, reporting on a wide variety of stories in virtually every medium for more than three decades. He has written dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, a play, and two books, including the bestselling memoir
Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the novel
A River Out Of Eden.
[2] He has written for
The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Columbia Journalism Review, Metropolis, and The Washington Post.
Hockenberry has appeared as a presenter or moderator at many design and idea conferences around the world including the TED conference, the World Science Festival in New York and in Brisbane, the Mayo Clinic’s Transform Symposium and the Aspen Comedy Festival. He has been a Distinguished Fellow at the
MIT Media Lab and serves on the White House Fellows Committee.
Early life[edit]
Journalism career[edit]
In 1995, Hockenberry published his memoir
Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence. In 1996 he appeared
off-Broadway in his one-man autobiographical play,
Spoke Man.
[12] From 1996 to 1997 he hosted
Edgewise, an eclectic news magazine program that aired on
MSNBC.
[13]
In 1999, he hosted
Hockenberry, a show which aired on MSNBC for 6 months.
[14] He also reported on the
Kosovo War in 1999. His weekly radio commentaries aired on the nationally broadcast public radio program
The Infinite Mind from 1998 to 2008. He also served as host on
The DNA Files for the series airing in 1998, 2001, and 2007. He began developing
The Takeaway in 2007 and hosted the show from its 2008 premiere until August 2017.
[15]
Hockenberry has narrated several nonfiction projects on
healthcare, including
Nova series
Survivor M.D.: Hearts & Minds, Who Cares: Chronic Illness in America,[16] Remaking American Medicine.
[17] He also narrated the
eugenics documentary
War Against the Weak.
He has written for
The New York Times,
The New Yorker,
I.D.,
Wired,
[18] The Columbia Journalism Review,
Details, and
The Washington Post. He published his first novel,
A River Out of Eden, in 2002, and he has written about "The Blogs of War" in
Wired magazine. In May 2006, he began writing his own blog, "The Blogenberry".
[19] On April 2, 2008, he hosted the premiere of the series
Nanotechnology: The Power of Small, discussing the impact of nanotechnology as concerns the general public.
[20]
Hockenberry has appeared as presenter and moderator at numerous design and idea conferences around the nation including the Aspen Design Summit,
The TED conference, the
World Science Festival, and the
Aspen Comedy Festival. He also regularly speaks on media, journalism, and disability issues. He was one of the founding inductees to the Spinal Cord Injury Hall of Fame in 2005.
Media criticism[edit]
In 2005 he wrote a scathing review of the Academy Award-winning film
Million Dollar Baby called "And the Loser Is..."
[21] The review was submitted to a disability website with the title "Million Dollar Bigot" as an exclusive feature. The essay was discussed in news articles globally, and Hockenberry was interviewed about it on
FAIR's weekly news show
Counterspin.
[22] A short documentary film was made, also called
Million Dollar Bigot, completed on July 13, 2005, featuring Hockenberry as well as many other disability activists.
[23]
Hockenberry wrote in the January 2008
Technology Review magazine that on the Sunday after the
September 11 attacks he was pitching stories on the origins of al Qaeda and
Islamic fundamentalism.
[24] He wrote that then-NBC programming chief
Jeff Zucker, who came into a meeting Hockenberry was having with
Dateline executive producer David Corvo, said
Dateline should instead focus on the firefighters and perhaps ride along with them à la
COPS, a Fox reality series. According to Hockenberry, Zucker said "that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine." Hockenberry has further claimed that
General Electric, NBC's parent company, discouraged him from talking to the Bin Laden family about their estranged family member. Hockenberry says that he asked GE, which does business with the Bin Laden family company, to help him get in contact with them. Instead, a PR executive called Hockenberry's hotel room in Saudi Arabia and read him a statement about how GE didn't see its "valuable business relationship" with the Bin Laden Group as having anything to do with
Dateline. In another instance, Hockenberry claimed a story he did about a
Weather Underground member would not appear on the Sunday edition of
Dateline unless the 1960s family drama
American Dreams, which followed
Dateline in the schedule at the time, did a show about "protesters or something."
[25]
Personal life[edit]
Hockenberry currently lives in
New York City and in
Massachusetts with his wife, Alison Craiglow Hockenberry, whom he married in 1995.
[26] They have five children, including two sets of twins: Zoe, Olivia, Regan, Zachary, and Ajax.
Great Britain
Wales
