Through Their Eyes

CBS News’s Michelle Miller, Jeff Pegues, and Jericka Duncan bring their experience and passion to covering some of today’s most important stories.

- By Marshall Sella

BY THE CLOSE OF 2020, THE WORLD seemed to be imploding. Any gaps in human-made issues—political unrest, racial and economic injustices—were filled with the biological, represented by the alarming numbers of COVID- 19 cases. And when the news took a respite from unfettered disease, it was pivoting to images of burning cars parked outside burning buildings: usually, the earmarks of civil war. All of the nation’s hidden malignancies, suddenly, had nowhere left to metastasize.

CBS News correspondents Michelle Miller, Jeff Pegues, and Jericka Duncan were dispatched to cover the country while it was backlit by flames and the growing solidarity of peaceful protests. Each is expert in what journalist trade-jargon calls “deep-dives”: reporting that is not given to superficiality. They don’t settle. They’re each people of color, each with a hand on the national pulse—but, beneath that, they are themselves exemplars of a far deeper kind of diversity. One of backgrounds, experience, and insights. Getting to the heart of the year’s events, to the truths of them, has demanded nothing less.

It was Jericka Duncan who spent real time with Breonna Taylor’s family and brought clarity and emotion to the story that eluded most other reporters. Her commitment to covering Taylor’s death, the national outrage, and the calls for justice that followed, is representative of the empathy and passion Duncan brings to every story. “Although I live in New York City,” she says, “being a reporter means going to wherever the story is and establishing connections within communities across America. Getting to know people and understanding them and their story is key. And I think that’s what keeps me asking questions.”