Irv Drasnin
Irv Drasnin is an American journalist, a producer-director-writer of documentary films for CBS News and PBS. Among the awards he has received for broadcast journalism are the duPont-Columbia, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, and the American Film and Video Blue Ribbon.
Films
Early life
Irv Drasnin was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on March 18, 1934, a son of immigrants: his father, Joseph, a U.S. Treasury Agent, was from Tsarist Russia, as was his mother, Clara Aaron. The family moved to Los Angeles when he was four years old. His oldest brother, Sid, was an architect, remembered for the Wayfarer's Chapel in Palo Verdes, California, and for The Gardens of the World in Thousand Oaks, California. His brother Bob played clarinet, sax and flute with the Les Brown Orchestra and Red Norvo quintet among others, performed in Carnegie Hall as a classical musician, was the director of music at CBS, and a composer and teacher.Education
Drasnin is a graduate of Carthay Center Elementary School, John Burroughs Junior High School and Los Angeles High School. He has a BA in political science from UCLA, where he was student body president ; editor of The Daily Bruin ; and Men's Representative to the Student Council. He also was a member of Project India, one of twelve students selected each year to spend the summer in India, speaking about America and interacting with Indian college students.He has a MA from Harvard in East Asian Studies with a specialization in China. He taught in the Master's Film Program at Stanford University.
Career
United Press International
He began his career as a reporter at United Press International, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the eastern division news headquarters, where the stories he covered included the steelworkers strike of 1959, the visits of Soviet leaders Kozlov and Khrushchev, Wightman Cup Tennis. He wrote both for newspapers and radio.CBS News Broadcasts
In 1961 he was hired by CBS News as a writer for daily news broadcasts, becoming a producer for Calendar, a public affairs program with Harry Reasoner; and the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. His assignments for the evening news covered major news events, including the civil rights movement. He was the producer of CBS News coverage in Selma, Alabama including "Bloody Sunday" and for the Senate passage of the Voting Rights Act that followed. Other assignments included the Republican Convention of 1964, the successful presidential campaign of Lyndon Johnson, the funeral of Winston Churchill in London, the space program, and the World Series, Dodgers vs the Orioles, Cardinals vs. the Red Sox.Documentary film years at CBS News and PBS
CBS News, 1966–79. PBS, 1982–92, for Frontline, The American Experience and Nova.His thirty documentaries include a chronicle of modern China beginning with Misunderstanding China, Shanghai, Looking for Mao, China After Tiananmen and The Revolutionary, an independent feature-length film.
When US-China relations were restored in 1972 after a 20-year hiatus, each of the three U.S. television networks was allowed access to film a documentary. Drasnin drew the assignment for CBS News, spending ten-weeks inside the country to make the film Shanghai. In 1991, he reported in depth from China in the wake of the government's violent crackdown on student-led demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, China After Tiananmen.
His foreign reporting also covered southern Africa and the last stands of white colonial rule in Who's Got A Right to Rhodesia and in Apartheid.
Mr. Drasnin's domestic topics include The Guns of Autumn, You and the Commercial, Health in America, Inside the Union, The Radio Priest, The Chip vs The Chess Master, and Forever Baseball.