Seth Doane is a CBS News correspondent based in Rome, reporting primarily for "CBS News Sunday Morning" and also contributing across CBS News broadcasts and platforms.
Based in Italy since 2016, Doane has covered terrorist attacks and breaking news across Europe, traveled with Pope Francis as part of his coverage of the Vatican, and has reported on issues ranging from migration to climate change. He has covered conflicts in the Middle East, reporting live from Damascus as U.S.-led coalition airstrikes hit targets in Syria, and Doane was among the first journalists to travel into the war-torn suburb of Douma as Bashar al-Assad's forces took control. He reported extensively from the West Bank, Gaza and Israel as the U.S. moved its embassy to Jerusalem.
Before moving to Rome, the Peabody and Emmy Award-winning journalist was CBS News' Asia correspondent for three years, based in Beijing, China. During that period, Doane covered a wide range of stories across the region, making an intrepid journey into the South China Sea to glimpse China's island-building efforts, traveling into closed-off North Korea twice, and reporting from across China on issues of economics, human rights, pollution, and politics. In Japan he suited-up and went inside reactor four at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima and covered the continuing fallout of the earthquake and tsunami.
Over the course of his career, Doane has traveled to around 70 countries and has filed stories from the front lines of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has reported from Greenland's glaciers and Chile's Atacama Desert where 33 miners were trapped. He has brought viewers to disaster zones including the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the earthquake that rattled Haiti, and the typhoon that devastated the Philippines.
He received the George Foster Peabody Award for a solo trip he took to Darfur where he shot and produced his report on the humanitarian situation in Sudan for the in-school television network Channel One News.
In the spring of 2020, Doane reported from the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis and early on contracted COVID-19. He reported from his home quarantine about his diagnosis and symptoms in an effort to reduce stigma, inform viewers, and chronicle his experience with and recovery from the virus.
Initially based in New York City for CBS News, Doane traveled extensively across the United States focusing, for a while, on a series for the "CBS Evening News" titled "The Other America," which chronicled the downturn of the U.S. economy ahead of the Great Recession. His reports gave heartbreaking glimpses of a struggling America, be it people lining up before dawn at free medical clinics or the employees of an Elkhart, Indiana, restaurant at the moment their boss announced he was going to have to lay off employees.
Even before becoming a dedicated correspondent for "CBS Sunday Morning," Doane regularly contributed to the broadcast, filing stories about the art of Bonsai in Japan, gondolas in Venice, and pianos made from the wood of Italy's stunning Val di Fiemme forest. He has profiled the Dalai Lama, Jane Goodall, Sophia Loren, and Sir Paul McCartney and delved into serious topics about gun violence and firearms regulations in Australia or gay priests in America.
Previously, Doane was a correspondent for "60 Minutes+," the streaming edition of 60 Minutes available on Paramount Global's Paramount+ service, where he took viewers on an action-packed adventure in an investigation of the powerful 'Ndrangheta mafia clans in Calabria, Italy. He also choppered to the Alps to see its vanishing glaciers, suited up to SCUBA dive into the bay of Naples to reveal the submerged, ancient town of Baia and traveled to the edge of an erupting volcano in Iceland.
Before joining CBS News, Doane was the New Delhi, India-based correspondent for CNN International. Doane started his on-camera career in Los Angeles at Channel One News, which was streamed to nearly eight million students in schools across the United States.
His first job in TV was with the Special Projects and Investigations unit for Fox 5 (WNYW-TV) in New York. While there, Doane was nominated for a local Emmy Award in the investigative category for a report he helped produce about school security at the age of 22.
Doane graduated from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC) in 2000 with a B.A. in Broadcast Journalism. He was born on Cape Cod and raised in Harwich, Massachusetts. He is proud of his roots on Cape Cod where his family has lived for 12 generations.
