Martha Teichner has been a correspondent for “CBS Sunday Morning” since December 1993, where she’s equally adept at covering major national and international breaking news stories as she is handling in-depth cultural and arts topics.
Since joining CBS News in 1977, Teichner has earned multiple national awards for her original reporting, including 12 Emmy Awards and five James Beard Foundation Awards. Teichner was also part of the team coverage of the Newtown, Conn., elementary school shooting which earned CBS News a 2014 duPont-Columbia Award. In 2020, Teichner was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame by Michigan Women Forward. And in 2018, Teichner was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York.
In the past year alone, Teichner’s work spanned the gamut of the human experience from a report on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, to a look at how the nation’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic had become political and from a report on police violence in America to a profile of a man who is a master upholsterer at Colonial Williamsburg.
As a correspondent for CBS News, Teichner has reported on the some of the largest national and international stories of this era, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the run-up to the war in Iraq, the death of Princess Diana and the life and death of Nelson Mandela. She’s interviewed world leaders and other newsmakers, including then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton twice for “CBS Sunday Morning” in 1995 and 1997.
Now based in New York, Teichner spent more than a dozen years as a foreign correspondent covering major international news. Teichner was twice assigned to the CBS News London bureau (1980-1984, 1989-1994), where she not only covered Britain’s royal wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, but many wars as one of only a handful of female war correspondents. Teichner also covered the Maze Prison Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland, the Lebanon War, the 1st Intifada in 1988 in Israel and the West Bank, and the conflicts associated with the collapse of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia). She reported on the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Romanian revolution. Teichner also spent several weeks in the Bolivian jungle reporting on undercover operations with the Drug Enforcement Agency.
During the Persian Gulf War, she was one of a small group of journalists allowed by the military to accompany U.S. troops. She spent nearly six weeks with the 1st Armored Division in the Saudi desert, but also covered the conflict from Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Israel.
Between her two London assignments, Teichner was based in Johannesburg (1987-1989) during the final dangerous years of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. She returned to report on Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and in 1994 she covered his election as the first Black president of a post-apartheid South Africa. Also, between London assignments, Teichner spent three years in the Dallas bureau (1984-1987), where she covered numerous stories in Latin America, among them the Mexico City earthquake.
She began her CBS News career as a correspondent based in the Atlanta bureau (1977-1980), where her assignments included the Cuban/Haitian boatlift to the United States, the war in El Salvador and the exile of the Shah of Iran to Panama. Her reporting on the exodus of Haitian and Cuban refugees to the U.S was featured in the CBS Radio special, “Exodus: The Freedom Flotilla,” which earned a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
While in Atlanta, Teichner covered a three-month strike by the coal miners in 1978 and numerous natural disasters.
Teichner began her journalism career at WJEF Radio and WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She then became a general assignment reporter for WTVJ-TV Miami and for WMAQ-TV Chicago.
She has narrated seven “Biography” programs for A&E. Teichner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Daughters of the American Revolution (Walter Hines Page chapter of London), the Reform Club in London, the Wellesley Club of New York, and both the New York and Charleston chapters of Les Dames d’Escoffier. Since 1995 she has served as moderator of “Conversations With …” an interview series at the Spoleto Festival, U.S.A., the summer arts celebration in Charleston, S.C.
Teichner is the author of the upcoming nonfiction book “When Harry Met Minnie,” to be published by Celadon in early 2021.
Teichner was born in Traverse City, Mich. She was graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. She attended the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business Administration. Teichner resides in New York City.
