Tony Cox, NPR Biography
Alternate Host and Contributor, News & Notes
Tony Cox has built a distinguished career in broadcast journalism that spans three decades in television and radio.
Cox joined NPR as the Friday host of The Tavis Smiley Show in November 2002. From December 2004-February 2005, he hosted NPR News with Tony Cox. Cox returned to NPR as an alternate host and contributor for News & Notes in 2006.
From 1998 to 2002, Cox was a sports correspondent for DirecTV Sports, conducting interviews with some of the biggest names in professional and collegiate sports on the direct broadcast satellite program, This Week on Sports.
During that time, Cox was also a national correspondent for Fox Sports Net, where he reported for The Last Word with Jim Rome, Goin' Deep, and for both the National Sports Report and The Southern California Regional Sports Report.
Prior to that, he spent nine years as senior correspondent and substitute host for Inside Edition, covering such major news events as the Los Angeles riots, the Oklahoma City bombing, the capture of the Unabomber, and the criminal trials of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers.
Cox began his career in 1969 in Los Angeles at KFWB All News Radio where, for more than 14 years, he worked as an award-winning reporter and anchor. From 1978 to 1980 he also hosted a public affairs show for Metromedia TV. He joined KCBS-TV in 1982 as a reporter and show host, and later moved to KTTV-FOX as a nightly news anchor, where he earned an Emmy for anchoring special coverage of a major airline crash.
Cox is an assistant professor of television film and media studies at California State University Los Angeles. He is the producer and narrator of The Gospel of Music with Jeff Majors on TV One, a black-owned, national cable television channel. Cox is a five-time winner of the Golden Mike and has won numerous Los Angeles Press Club Awards and two NAACP Image Awards.
