Biography

Dennis Murphy is an American television journalist and winner of four national Emmys for excellence in news reporting, known for regular contributions to NBC News, NBC Nightly News, Dateline NBC, The Today Show and NBC News at Sunrise.

Before joining NBC News, Murphy was a reporter for KING-TV, the NBC affiliate in Seattle, Washington. He began his career as a desk assistant at WCBS-TV in New York and worked for several years as an assignment editor, producer and reporter at KHOU-TV in Houston, Texas.

Murphy began his career as an NBC News correspondent in 1982 at the Burbank bureau. The following year he was assigned to Miami from where he traveled extensively throughout South and Central America. The invasion of Grenada, civil war in Nicaragua and El Salvador, a deadly volcanic eruption in Colombia and drug lords were all part of his watch in the 1980s. In 1988 he covered the Democratic presidential primaries and was NBC's traveling correspondent on the Bush campaign.

Since May 1994, Murphy has been a correspondent with Dateline NBC. In 2000, he received an Edward R. Murrow Award for a report on Hurricane Floyd and a Clarion award for a spot news story on the Oklahoma City bombing. In 1999, he was awarded an Emmy Award, Clarion Award, Harry Chapin Media Award and a National Headliner Award for "Children of the Harvest," the story about children in the U.S. working as migrant laborers on farms. In addition, he received a Clarion Award for his work on "A Few Good Men," the story of several men from one marine unit who fought together in Vietnam.

In 1996, he was honored with two Emmys for his work on Dateline and an American Bar Association certificate of merit for an hour-long Dateline program on the anatomy of a civil trial.

Dennis J. Murphy has covered stories for NBC News from more than 50 countries. As a regular contributor to NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and Today, his assignments have given him a front-row seat for some of the biggest stories of the last two decades—from wars in the Persian Gulf and Central America to the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Berlin Wall, and the war on terror in Afghanistan.