Stone Phillips
West 1973
Stone Phillips, the principal anchor of the award-winning newsmagazine "Dateline NBC," graduated from West High in 1973 and majored in philosophy at Yale University. He currently lives in New York. Stone has also served as a substitute anchor on "NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw" and "Today," and as a substitute moderator on "Meet the Press."
Stone began his career in 1978 at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, Ga., where he worked as a reporter and broadcast producer. Later, he moved to ABC, first as a general assignment correspondent for "World News Tonight and then as a correspondent for ABC News' "20/20."
Over the years Stone has interviewed a number of news-makers including: President George Bush, Boris Yeltsin, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack Kevorkian, Bernhard Goetz and Michael Jordan. He interviewed former Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose about the D.C. area sniper shootings as well as the nine rescued Pennsylvania coal miners.
Stone's ten years as a television correspondent took him to hot spots across the globe, including war-torn Beirut in 1982, India after Indira Ghandi's assassination, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the refugee camps of Hong Kong. In one of his more dangerous assignments, he allowed himself to be blindfolded by Colombian drug traffickers as they led him to a cocaine kitchen hidden in the hills of Bogota.
Honors received include numerous Emmy awards for his interviewing skills and news coverage. He received the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Chi Delta Award for Public Service, the Investigative Reporters and Editor's Gold Medal, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and three National Headliner Awards. His work has also earned him distinctions from the Overseas Press Club of America, the National Society of Black Journalists, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association.