Matt Gutman

Matt Gutman (born December 5, 1977) is an American journalist and author who is currently the chief correspondent for CBS News.

He has been recognized with multiple awards from organizations including The Emmy Awards, RTDNA, the Peabody and the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of the books No Time to Panic: How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks (2023) and The Boys in the Cave: Deep Inside the Impossible Rescue in Thailand (2018) about the Tham Luang cave rescue. He was the host of the American weekly TV series Sea Rescue when it ended in September 2018 and won an Emmy for Outstanding Children's Series in 2016.

Early life and education Matthew A. Gutman was born to a Jewish family in Princeton, New Jersey on December 5, 1977. His father, Paul, was killed in a small plane crash in Georgia on September 25, 1990, when Gutman was 12 years old.

Gutman attended Newark Academy, where he was honored as a scholar-athlete football player. He graduated from Williams College in 2000.

He was named ABC News' Chief National Correspondent in January 2018. In his years with ABC News he covered wars from Ukraine to Gaza, and every kind of natural disaster, from earthquakes in Japan, to volcanoes in Chile to tornados in Oklahoma.

On the morning of January 7, 2025 he was among the first network reporters on scene at the Palisades fire in Pacific Palisades, California. He would report on the devastating impact of those fires on multiple Los Angeles-area cities for the next two weeks, while packing up his own family for evacuation.

On December 9, 2025, it was announced that he would leave ABC for CBS News.

CBS News On December 9, 2025, CBS News announced that Gutman would be joining the network as chief correspondent on January 5, 2026, to be based in Los Angeles. Since then Gutman has covered the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and the war with Iran for the network.

Suspension and return In January 2020, Gutman in a live special report broadcast minutes after the helicopter in which Kobe Bryant was traveling crashed, was suspended for a month by ABC News for incorrectly reporting that, during the death of Kobe Bryant in the 2020 Calabasas helicopter crash, all four of Bryant's children had died when only Bryant's 13-year-old daughter Gianna, "Gigi", was on board the helicopter and perished in the crash. Gutman's book indicates that experience served as a jumping off point "for a personal journey into the science and treatment of panic attacks," which his book says he has suffered for decades.

That February, Gutman resumed reporting for ABC and appeared on the network's shows. Later in the year, on October 23, 2020, his work appeared in an episode of 20/20 entitled "The Perfect Liar," a documentary about wrongful conviction, in which he interviewed jailhouse informant Paul Skalnik and death row inmate James Dailey.

In February 2021, Gutman was again suspended from ABC News for a short time for violating Disney COVID-19 policies for reporting in a Los Angeles-area hospital for newsgathering purposes. Despite being invited into the hospital by its CEO and medical staff, Gutman had not received the advance permission of ABC News management.

In September 2025 he was criticized for describing messages, read out to a packed press conference by Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray, between Tyler Robinson (alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk) and his partner as "a very intimate portrait," "fulsome" "speaking so lovingly about his partner" and "very touching."

On August 14, 2026, Gutman was accused of workplace harassment in a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by a former ABC News colleague. The former colleague, Samira Said, alleges that Gutman created a hostile work environment through two incidents while they were colleagues at ABC News.

Books Gutman's first book, The Boys in the Cave, tells the story of the little known true events behind the miraculous rescue of 13 Thai boys and their coach from the Tham Luang cave in July 2018. It was published in November 2018. It has been translated into six languages.

Gutman's second book, No Time to Panic, published in 2023, and which became a best seller (USA Today) chronicles Gutman's previously undisclosed 20-year battle with panic attacks.