Miles O'Brien
- Broadcast Veteran
- PBS Reporter
- CNN's Former Science and Tech Correspondent
Travels From
New York
Miles O'Brien Speaker Biography
Miles O’Brien is a veteran, freelance broadcast and web journalist who focuses on science, technology and aerospace.
He is the Science Correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, and a regular correspondent for the PBS documentary series FRONTLINE and the National Science Foundation Science Nation series.
For nearly seventeen of his thirty years in the news business, he worked for CNN – as the Science and Space Correspondent and the anchor of various programs, including American Morning.
While at CNN, he secured a deal with NASA to become the first journalist to fly on the space shuttle. The project ended with the loss of Columbia and her crew in 2003 – a story he told to the world in a critically acclaimed sixteen-hour marathon of live coverage.
Miles O’Brien is an accomplished aviator who often pilots his own airplane to assignments, and is frequently called upon to explain the vagaries of aviation to a mass audience.
He has won numerous awards over the years, including a half-dozen Emmys, aPeabody and DuPont for his coverage of Climate Change, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, the Atlanta Olympic Park Bombing, space exploration and the airline industry.
Based in Washington, DC, he owns a company that produces great video journalism as well as content for corporate clients. He was a history major at Georgetown. Call Executive Speakers Bureau to book Miles O"Brien - 901-754-9404.
A funny thing happened on my way to the Network Anchor Chair – It Shrunk!
~ How the old analog, linear world of broadcasting has morphed into something very different.
Digital technology and the internet have flattened the playing field – and now anyone can play in the game for the cost of a DV camera and a laptop. Who needs a big honkin’ satellite truck and a surly union video crew? It has the Mainstream Media running scared – and rightfully so. If everyone can play in this game, what value do the big outfits add to the equation? But their steady loss is a huge gain for millions of people who have something they want to share with the world. How can we navigate this twenty-first century tower of Babel? Weren’t we better off with Uncle Walter telling us “that’s the way it is”? And, most important, how will guys like me pay their kids’ college tuitions?
Your Ticket to Space
A handful of deep pocketed, strongly committed dot-com and gaming millionaires and billionaires are changing the nature of space travel as we know it. Disillusioned with NASA’s progress (or lack thereof) in bringing space to a larger clientele, they are building their own rockets that will take tourists to space. But they are finding it is rocket science – and compared to banging out code – a very humbling experience. So will they really open up the space frontier – or will their space ventures go bust?
Powering Our World
There are a lot of people who believe the world has passed its peak pumping oil out of the ground. Couple that with the explosive growth in China and India and concerns about global warming – and you have a recipe for a mandatory sea change in the way we power our world. The Obama administration is vowing to forge a new “green economy”, with power from the sun instead of trapped in fossil fuels. But when you do the math on what we need every day versus what we can produce with renewables – you are left with a grim deficit. Are there enough great ideas out there to fill the gap and maintain our lifestyle?
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