Barbara Harrison

News4 Reporter

Barbara Harrison has been a treasured Washington journalist for more than 35 years.

Harrison has covered everything from politics to performing arts and from crime to the plight of abused and abandoned children. Her exclusive interviews with presidents, first ladies, politicians, celebrities and athletes have established her as one of Washington’s most inventive interviewers.

For more than 15 years, Washington woke up to Harrison and her longtime co-anchor Joe Krebs. The pair anchored the area’s number-one morning newscast.

Perhaps Harrison’s most enduring legacy is a program she created to help children in foster care. The franchise, known as Wednesday’s Child, is credited with helping finding permanent homes for hundreds of children in the Washington area. It has been the model for similar programs in major cities across the nation.

Harrison has also written and hosted many special programs, including her annual Christmas on Embassy Row special, in which she shares cultures and traditions from around the world that are celebrated in our local embassies.

Although she grew up on the campus of Prairie View A & M University, where her father was a professor of journalism, Harrison left Texas to attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie New York. She went on to earn a Master's Degree at Columbia University in New York City.

It was in that city that she began her career in television journalism as a writer-producer for WNET-TV in New York. A move to San Francisco also brought a move to the on-air side of the broadcast business. She became host of popular radio shows on the ABC-owned stations KSFX and KGO-Radio. She moved to television with a move back to Texas, where she reported and anchored at KDFW-TV in Dallas. In 1980 she returned to San Francisco to anchor at KGO-TV. In the fall of 1981, she joined the staff at WRC/NBC4 in Washington.

In addition the many EMMYs and countless other awards for reporting, the Washington Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences also honored her with The Ted Yates Award for outstanding community service. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Tufty Award for outstanding journalism from the Washington area chapter of American Women in Radio and Television.

Contact Us