Rather than scramble to find a full-time replacement for Ed Bradley, who was felled by leukemia on Nov. 9, 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager says the show will instead finish out the season by spreading the veteran reporter's workload around. "It's a long-term project to find the [person] who can show the abilities that are expected of a 60 Minutes correspondent," Fager tells the AP. As for any perceived onus to replace the newsmagazine's lone African-American on-screen reporter with another, Steve Kroft says, "It would be a mistake to address that [issue of diversity] just for the sake of addressing that."
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Ed Bradley, the award-winning CBS newsman who has been a correspondent for 60 Minutes since 1981, died of leukemia on Thursday. He was 65. Bradley's long career was marked with an assortment of honors, including a Peabody award (for a June 2000 report on Africans dying of AIDS), a Damon Runyon Award for career journalistic excellence, and 19 Emmys, the most recent of which was earned for a segment on the reopening of the racially motivated murder case of Emmett Till.UPDATE: In a statement, fellow veteran newsman Dan Rather says, "With the passing of Ed Bradley we have lost one of America's best. As a compassionate, sensitive person, as a gentle but strong man, as a lover of life, and as a great professional, he was an example of all a conscientious and dedicated journalist can be."For more, see the Reuters obituary.
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