Business

NBC’s Kerry Sanders speaks at chamber dinner

A retired broadcast journalist spoke in Marietta on Monday night.

The Marietta Area Chamber of Commerce held its 109th Annual Dinner Monday night at the Dyson Baudo Recreation Center. The keynote speaker was retired NBC broadcaster Kerry Sanders.

For 32 years Sanders was NBC's Miami-based correspondent. He was a regular on the Today Show and regularly contributed to NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt and MSNBC. He covered both features and breaking news during his career, including stories on plane crashes, swimming with bull sharks, saving a beached baby dolphin and more. In 2023 Sanders retired as a senior national news correspondent, according to information provided by MACC.

Sanders spoke to attendees, sharing several stories from his career, including how his national news career started.

"It began with a drug deal," Sanders said. "If you're in the military you may understand what that means".

Sanders said he was working for the local CBS affiliate in Tampa, Fla., and was on an assignment where he had been living with some Marines for two weeks in the Kuwaiti desert. The Pentagon had selected a team of reporters from every network to embed with the military to cover the war in Iraq and he was not chosen. Instead he was there to do a buildup story.

"Being in the right place at the right time is kind of how my career happened," Sanders said.

He was in the right place at the right time because one of the reporters that was supposed to be embedded got into a fight with an executive producer and was pulled from the assignment. His boss asked if he could go in the reporter’s place, Sanders said.

Sanders went and talked to the lieutenant colonel of the marines he was in the desert with. He told the lieutenant colonel they had the gear and a Humvee and he wanted to go with the marines to Iraq, he said.

"(The lieutenant colonel) turned to me and he goes 'You trying to cut a drug deal with me?'" Sanders said.

He had never heard that phrase and asked the lieutenant colonel what he meant.

"He goes, `in the military that's making a side deal to do whatever you want.'" Sanders said. "And I said 'Let's do a drug deal' and he said 'Okay, you only have one thing that you must achieve before you get embedded with us.'"

Sanders had to get an anthrax shot. He received one and was embedded with that group of marines and crossed the desert into Iraq to cover the war.

"Here we were in the right place at the right time telling this story," Sanders said.

After he covered the war in Iraq and covered wars and conflicts in several other places, Sanders said he needed to move into more upbeat reporting.

Sanders talked about some of the upbeat stories he covered, including saving a baby dolphin who was washed up on the shore after a hurricane in western Florida and a group of Texas high school girls working to save bees in their small town.

During his talk, Sanders also talked about his views on the importance of the media.

"I’m here to say it is the responsibility of everybody in this room to support the media, especially local media," Sanders said.

According to Sanders, half of United States counties have no news outlet and 2.5 newspapers fail a week. He said that the media is a big part of democracy and that people wouldn't have information about things like local races without journalists because of the research they do for their stories.

Michelle Dillon can be reached at mdillon@newsandsentinel.com