Reporter Who Survived Deadly Bomb Attack and Best-Selling Author of Breathing the Fire
“A master storyteller and one tough journalist. America is lucky to have her on the front lines of reporting.” — Tom Brokaw
Kimberly Dozier joined the Associated Press as a correspondent, covering intelligence and counterterrorism in spring 2010, and her work takes her to the heart of the war on violent extremism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Before that, she was a CBS News correspondent, covering the White House and the Pentagon for CBS News’ Washington bureau from 2007 to 2010. She worked primarily in Iraq from 2003 to 2006, spending most time of her in Baghdad from her home bureau in Jerusalem. In her 14-year career as a foreign correspondent, she covered the Middle East extensively for the CBS Evening News, CBS’ Sunday Morning, The Early Show, and CBS Radio News, as well as the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Monitor Radio, the Voice of America, and the BBC World Service.
Her 2008 memoir Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq, details her full recovery from the car bomb that hit her team while covering a 4th ID patrol in Baghdad in May 2006. That bombing killed the US Army officer her team was filming–Captain James Alex Funkhouser, along with his Iraqi translator “Sam,” and Dozier’s colleagues CBS cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan. The proceeds from the paperback version, Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report and Get Back to the Fight, will benefit wounded warrior charities.
“With self-deprecating wit, Dozier recounts her determination to recover, never straying into self-pity. Her wounds gave her an insider’s perspective on one of the top military stories on the home front: inattention to veterans’ medical and psychological care. As a television celebrity, however, she faced the opposite problem: a crush of attention from other reporters. ‘I was a single representative showing [the public] in a horribly fresh way something they’d long been numb to.’” — The Washington Post, 2009
Her assignments for television and radio have spanned several continents–from Iraq under Saddam to the invasion of Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, to the the Kosovo refugee exodus, to Vladimir Putin’s election, to the downing of the US spy plane in China and the violence of Northern Ireland’s not-so-peaceful peace process.
Dozier has received multiple awards including a 2009 Sigma Delta Chi award for her coverage of troops on the home front for the CBS Evening News, a 2008 Peabody Award, and the 2008 RTNDA/Edward R. Murrow Award for a CBS News Sunday Morning report on two women veterans who lost limbs in Iraq. She received another Murrow Award in 2002 as part of the CBS News radio team reporting on Afghanistan. She has also received three American Women in Radio and Television (AWRT) Gracie Awards–in 2000, 2001 and 2002–for her radio reports on Mideast violence, Kosovo and the Afghan war, as well as the organization’s Grand Gracie Award in 2007 for her body of television work in Iraq.
And she was the first woman journalist recognized for her Iraq reporting with a Tex McCreary award from the National Medal of Honor Society.
