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Joe Schlesinger, CM (born May 11, 1928) is a Canadian television journalist and author.

He was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family; his family moved to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. In 1939, his parents sent him and his brother to a school for Czechoslovakian refugees in Wales organized by Nicholas Winton to escape the threat posed by Nazi Germany. After the war, he returned to Bratislava and found out that his parents had been killed in the Holocaust.

In 1948, he worked as a translator for the Associated Press and soon he left Czechoslovakia to Austria to escape the communists. In 1950, he emigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He studied at the University of British Columbia.

After spending time as a journalist in Toronto, London and for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1966. He retired from full-time employment in 1994, but continues to produce essays and special reports for CBC News. He was a host on CBC Newsworld and producer of commentaries and documentaries for CBC Prime Time News.

In 1990, he wrote his autobiography, Time Zones: a Journalist in the World which became a bestseller.

In 1994, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. He was nominated for 18 Gemini Awards and won three awards, for "Best Reportage" (1987 and 1992) and "Best News Magazine Segment" (2004). He was also awarded the John Drainie Award (1997) and "Best Performance by a Broadcast Journalist (Gordon Sinclair Award)" (1987).

Canadian actor Donald Sutherland narrated his following quote at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

I came to Canada as a refugee. Forty-five years later, for me, Canada is a refuge still.

On June 7, 2010, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Queen's University in Kingston and delivered the convocation speech to a part of the graduating class of 2010 from Queens Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He declared that the students would forget a good part of what they learned but they can find out what they need to know in the realm of facts by "googling it"!

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Joe Schlesinger", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0