African-American History

In Miami, Florida, a car plunges into a canal. Slowly at first, then rapidly, the water seeps through the floorboards, rises, whooshes around the steering wheel, bubbles toward the ceiling. The young man in the driver’s seat is a certified diver with a tank of air beside him. Trained by a rescue chief, he is demonstrating what to do in such an emergency. His profile appears calm until the water engulfs his neck. He raises his head, tries to escape the rising flood, gasps for air, searches for the regulator (breathing tube) on the seat. Five seconds elapse. He pushes the window down, but can’t rise. In his panic he has forgotten the acronym POGO the rescue chief taught him: first POP the seat belt, then OPEN the window and GET OUT. He remains anchored. Ten seconds. The car sinks lower. Finally he remembers, releases the confining strap and shoots out, clawing his way through the imprisoning water to the surface. He gulps air.

This is one of the exhibitions, perhaps the scariest, reporter Len Cannon has made on the NBC news magazine DATELINE. This normally suave young man with the mellow voice has presented other dangerous incidents on television. One was being buried in snow to demonstrate a jacket containing an hour’s air supply, especially designed for skiers and mountain climbers who may be caught in avalanches. Not fearful of closed-in places, he was all right until the light disappeared. Then it became frightening even though he knew he had access to air and people were standing by ready to dig him out.

Len Cannon, born January 15, 1957, graduated in broadcasting from a small liberal arts college in Ashland, Ohio. His name hasn’t reached the celebrity of Jane Pauley, Stone Phillips or Maria Shriver — yet. But his dauntless exhibitions and professional delivery give him star quality. He looks his subjects in the eye, listens intently, clarifies, and enhances his well-written scripts with captivating charm.

Based in New York, Cannon has been with DATELINE since December 1994. His work has taken him around the world and in forty-eight of the fifty states, about a half million miles. It’s good that he loves travel.

One of his favorite assignments was a diving expedition in Walkers Key, the Bahamas. There, in the ocean, he waited for sharks to come, after his crew dropped bait. “If you keep your hands close to your body, generally they don’t mess with you,” he said. At first it was a bit scary, but by the second day of filming he began to relax and was able to admire the beauty of the animals. His explanation illustrates his unflappable demeanor on camera. “Usually shark attacks are not deadly because they don’t eat people. They mistake you for something else like seals and will grab you. When they realize that’s not what they want they let you go.”

Another assignment Cannon enjoyed covering was the 1999 Eco Challenge race in Patagonia, Argentina. In addition to the excitement of the arduous competition including horseback riding, lake kayaking, whitewater canoeing and mountain trekking, he was caught with the pristine beauty of the countryside.

An African American, he managed to remain unruffled in a New Orleans news conference with David Duke, former clansman who ran for governor of Louisiana. Asked how he managed to maintain objectivity, Cannon replied, “Even though my personal opinions were negative, professionally you can’t let that interfere.”

Assignments he finds most challenging are not the frightening demonstrations he has done. Instead, they are investigative reports like confronting owners of “work-at-home” scams and his work on the Jon Bonet Ramsey case in Colorado. Those always carry the danger of lawsuits.

That is why script writing is a lengthy and collaborative process. He, senior producers and lawyers edit and screen his producer’s initial writing, sometimes as many as a dozen times before it is ready to broadcast.

Some of Cannon’s experiences have broadened his view of life. That was the case in Haiti where he spent five days. “It was horrible,” he said. In the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere he witnessed people cooking on the street, children malnourished, disease-ridden due to hunger and a lack of a good health care system. “Yet,” he said, “the people were wonderful, nice, gracious.” He sympathized with young men at the airport who grabbed and carried his bags, hoping to earn a little money.

Travel has exposed him not only to poverty, but also to different cultures. “There’s more than American culture. There’s a lot out there. It’s a big world and we’re a very small part of it.”

Perhaps it’s experiences such as these that have helped him maintain the philosophy of life instilled at an early age by his mother, a Pentecostal minister and father, also in broadcasting. When asked how he would like to be remembered Cannon said, “No matter who you were, no matter what your status in life was, that I treated you the same and that I — I’d speak to everybody, be polite and courteous to everyone.”

“My father always says, ‘When you see people in this business who have attitudes and are self-important, they should go outside and look at the world and realize how insignificant they are and then maybe they’ll understand.’ I think that’s something to always remember.”

Cannon also covered the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.