Stone Phillips is co-anchor of the award-winning newsmagazine Dateline NBC. For the past fifteen years, he has reported on a wide range of topics and conducted groundbreaking interviews that have earned numerous distinctions.
Recently, Phillips anchored live from Blacksburg, Virginia and reported on the massacre at Virginia Tech, the largest shooting in the nation's history. In September 2005, Phillips reported from the Gulf Coast on the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina. His acclaimed hour-long analysis of how and why government prevention and recovery efforts failed capped ten days of intensive coverage that won Dateline and NBC Nightly News an Alfred I. duPont Award.
Phillips’ list of exclusive interviews is long and impressive. He conducted the first network interviews with Private Lynndie England, the soldier at the center of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Scott Waddle, the U.S. Naval Commander whose nuclear submarine accidentally struck a Japanese fishing boat in Hawaii, and Harry Schmidt, the fighter pilot whose accidental bombing of Canadian forces in Afghanistan became an international incident. Phillips also conducted the first television interview with Charles Moose, the former Montgomery County Police Chief who led the investigation into the sniper shootings in the Washington D.C. area.
Other newsmakers and celebrities interviewed by Phillips include President George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Jr., Russian President Boris Yeltsin, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack Kevorkian, Michael Jordan, Sophia Loren, Glen Campbell, rock star and cancer survivor Melissa Etheridge, Howard Stern, Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres and Joe Torre. His 1996 interview with New York subway gunman Bernhard Goetz earned Phillips an Emmy Award for Outstanding Interview.
In a career that has spanned nearly thirty years in network news, Phillips has worked not only in front of the camera, but behind-the-scenes as an assignment editor in Washington, D.C. and an investigative producer. As a correspondent, Phillips has reported from Beirut during the 1982 war in Lebanon, from India following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and from Southeast Asia during the exodus of boat people from Vietnam. He has also reported from several South and Central American countries on the issue of drug trafficking and corruption, including an exclusive interview Panamanian President Manuel Noriega.
Before joining NBC News in 1992, Phillips spent twelve years with ABC News where he served as a correspondent for World News Tonight and later for 20/20. He began his career in 1978 at WXIA-TV in Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked as a writer, broadcast producer and reporter.
Phillips majored in philosophy at Yale University, where he graduated with honors and was the starting quarterback on Yale’s 1976 Ivy League Champion football team. As a junior, Phillips received Yale’s F. Gordon Brown Award for Outstanding Academic and Athletic Leadership.
Other honors include the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service, the Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Gold Medal, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and several National Headliner Awards. Phillips’ work has also been recognized by the Overseas Press Club of America, the National Society of Black Journalists, the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association.
Phillips was born in Texas City, Texas, and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He is married and has a son.