Fred de Sam Lazaro

Fred de Sam Lazaro (born July 21, 1956) is an American television journalist, best known for his work on the PBS NewsHour. He is one of the program's two longest-serving correspondents, having joined it in 1985, the same year as Paul Solman.

Early life and education De Sam Lazaro was born in Bengaluru, India, the youngest of 12 children. of Goa, which during their time there was within the Portuguese State of India.

Bernardino de Sam Lazaro was a musician, piano manufacturer and music store owner in Shanghai, a prominent figure among Portuguese expatriates in Shanghai, he served on a relief commission assisting Portuguese nationals during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Alda (née da Silva) was a medical doctor neighborhood and had three more children. His mother operated a maternity clinic Desmond Tutu, and Leonard Peltier.

Jim Lehrer, who anchored the program during the first 25 years of de Sam Lazaro's tenure there, praised him as "the ultimate professional", saying "he works hard, he works fast and he works fair." De Sam Lazaro has said that the global nature of his work began when he would file stories about his country of origin while vacationing there, demonstrating to NewsHour producers that he could do high-quality reporting for them from India "for a fraction of the normal cost because I could function as a native and was well-networked."

A longtime beat for him was AIDS — in particular, the impact and treatment of it in the developing world — which he reported on for two decades,

Coverage of social and labor unrest in Minnesota

The first NewsHour story assigned to de Sam Lazaro was the 1985 Hormel meatpackers' strike, He returned to the Austin plant and headquarters of Hormel in 2025 for a piece on the strike's 40th anniversary.

He was a primary correspondent for the program in its coverage of the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath, local protests following the killing of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb during the trial; and police reform efforts in the Twin Cities area related to those events.

De Sam Lazaro also extensively covered Operation Metro Surge for the NewsHour, with more than a dozen reports in 2025 and 2026 on Department of Homeland Security immigration actions in Minnesota and their impact on its residents — and on the killings by Federal agents of nonimmigrant U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

Other work In addition to the NewsHour, de Sam Lazaro has contributed to other PBS programs. He was a correspondent and substitute host for Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and "The Dying Fields" (2007), which examined an epidemic of suicide among farmers in the Vidarbha region of central India.

In the 1990s and 2000s, he served as a producer of local programs including NewsNight Minnesota and immigrant

Awards, honors and public service Awards 2002 Seth Eastman: Painting the Dakota Bronze Wrangler Western Heritage Awards Executive producer, for Twin Cities Public Television; shared with producer/director Kristian Berg and narrator Peter Coyote 2003 Stem Cell Research Outstanding Story SAJA Journalism Awards For Religion and Ethics Newsweekly 2008 The Dying Fields Professional News Analysis CINE Golden Eagle Awards For Wide Angle 2011 In Middle East, Coalition Tries to Ease Tension over Water Outstanding Single Story Society of Environmental Journalists Awards For PBS NewsHour 2025 Toxic Trifecta Outstanding Climate, Environment and Weather Coverage News and Documentary Emmy Awards Two-part NewsHour report about the dumping of junk cars, electronic waste and used clothing by the West in Ghana 2026 Cuts & Consequences Outstanding Continuing Coverage: Short Form News and Documentary Emmy Awards Contributed segment on funding cuts for tuberculosis prevention and treatment in Bangladesh to ongoing NewsHour coverage of the shutdown of USAID Honors De Sam Lazaro holds honorary doctorates from institutions including Arcadia University and St. John's University; he has also served as commencement speaker at St. John's, as well as at Carleton College

He has been a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan; a Senior Distinguished Fellow at the St. Mary's University of Minnesota's Hendrickson Institute for Ethical Leadership; and a frequent grantee of the Pulitzer Center.

Public service De Sam Lazaro has served on the boards of MinnPost, the Children's Law Center of Minnesota, the Asian American Journalists Association and the South Asian Association for Leaders of Tomorrow, and as a trustee of his alma mater, the College of St. Scholastica. neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota and have three adult children.

An impromptu conversation in 1992 with staff at a Minneapolis music store about his father's career as a piano maker led to his locating, six years later, a Lazaro upright built by him, which he bought and had shipped from Shanghai to Minnesota.