Steve Bell

Stephen Scott Bell (December 9, 1935 – January 25, 2019) was an American journalist and educator. He was news anchor of the ABC News programs Good Morning America and World News This Morning, and a professor emeritus of telecommunications at Ball State University.

Early life A native of Oskaloosa, Iowa, Bell studied as an undergraduate at Iowa's Central College and went on to earn a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Career Bell was an ABC News correspondent from 1967 to 1986. He first covered the Vietnam War in 1967, and was held in detention in Cambodia in 1970 while investigating an alleged massacre of nearly 100 Vietnamese civilians by Cambodian soldiers. He met Ted Koppel, later the anchor of the ABC program Nightline, during his years in Southeast Asia, and they became good friends. After his return to the United States, he began working on Good Morning America, becoming the broadcast's news anchor in 1975. On January 28, 1986, Bell broke the news via an ABC News Special Report that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. He stayed for 11 years. He left ABC in 1986 and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to co-anchor evening newscasts for KYW-TV. While there, he also anchored short-form news updates for the USA Network, alongside his colleagues at KYW, titled USA Updates.

Bell left KYW in 1992 during an overhaul of the station's newscasts. He became a telecommunications professor at Ball State University in August 1992. He was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2004.