NBC's John Yang is Convention Keynote Speaker at Gala Banquet

May 3, 2009

NBC News White House correspondent John Yang will be the keynote speaker at this year's Gala Scholarship & Awards Banquet, which takes place on Saturday, August 15, 7 -9 p.m. at the 20th Annual National Convention in Boston.

Yang is an NBC News correspondent based in Washington, where he covers a variety of stories for “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “Today” and MSNBC.

Before joining NBC in January 2007, Yang had been an ABC News correspondent since 1999, based in Washington and Jerusalem.

In September 2007, Yang was the only television correspondent to accompany President Bush on his surprise visit to a U.S. airbase in Anbar Province in Iraq, west of Baghdad. During the visit, he conducted a one-on-one interview with the President.

As ABC News’s Middle East correspondent, Yang covered many major events in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the 2002 Israeli military operation in the West Bank and the final days of the standoff at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Yang also spent extensive time in Iraq and was the first American broadcast reporter to interview captured al Qaeda fighters imprisoned by Kurds along the Iran-Iraq border.

In 2000, he covered the presidential campaign of then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush during the Republican primaries. That fall, he covered then-Vice President Al Gore’s campaign through Election Day and the Florida recount.

In the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Yang reported from the Pentagon and was part of the ABC News team honored with both the George Foster Peabody Award and an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award.

Yang was also part of the ABC News team honored with an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II.

Prior to joining ABC News, Yang was a reporter and editor at The Washington Post for nearly ten years. As a reporter, he covered Congress and the White House. As an editor, he directed coverage of economic policy in the paper’s business section and oversaw political features in The Post’s ‘Style’ section. Throughout his print career, he covered Congress and national politics. He had previously worked for The Boston Globe, Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal.

Yang was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, and graduated cum laude from Wesleyan University.