Mike Lee is an Emmy and Peabody award winning former U.S. TV network correspondent currently based in Washington DC. He has covered the world for 47 years for ABC, CBS, KPIX-TV and WFAA-TV. His work as a global correspondent includes countless major news stories, and human interest features reported from over forty nations.
Lee’s first assignment as a foreign correspondent was his two-year marathon coverage of the civil war in Beirut, for which he received the Overseas Press Club Award. Over the years, Lee has maintained his interest in Middle Eastern affairs, reporting from the scene of major stories in Iran, Beirut, Israel, Iraq, Qatar, Libya, Syria, Egypt and the UAE. Lee was the first network TV news correspondent to travel extensively in Saudi Arabia. He spent an unprecedented six weeks in the Kingdom and his reporting from Saudi Arabia resulted in a three part series on ‘World News Tonight,’ plus stories for ‘Nightline’ and ’20/20.’ He was the first ABC News correspondent into northern Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and was part of the ABC News team that received a Peabody award for coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath.
Lee has reported from just about every major location throughout Europe: His assignments have taken him many times to eastern European countries during and after the Cold War. He often reported from Russia. During the The night the Berlin Wall came down, he sampled public opinion in the German countryside when reporting live from an outlying border post for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.” Lee reported on the democratic changes in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. He covered the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu during his last weeks in power, then returned to Bucharest during the December revolution. As a London correspondent for CBS and ABC he has covered the ongoing story of the British-IRA conflict, British politics, the Royal Family, and numerous other stories. Lee has interviewed a wide variety of leaders, and people from all walks of life, around the world.
Lee pioneered the one person coverage at ABC News with Mike Lee on the Road to Anywhere. He spent fifty days on the road with stops in South Africa, Ghana, Australia, the South Pacific, Asia and Latin America, finding and reporting stories not often covered on major news networks. Peter Jennings described Mike’s groundbreaking ‘Road’ series as “…the best way to practice journalism.”
Lee’s ‘Road to Anywhere’ has also taken him to Latin America, where he produced a series of ABC News reports.
Lee’s forthcoming Substack newsletter draws on his years of experience as a foreign correspondent, delving into contemporary issues with experts in their field: In-depth conversations with interesting people about the news.
