His father, a minister, was a master storyteller, and his mother a music teacher who was “constantly drumming into us the importance of cadence.” Morrison was born in Canada in the small farming and oil town of Lloydminster on the Saskatchewan-Alberta border. We were taking these intensely affecting, deeply personal incidents in people’s lives and making entertainment from them.” But he also recognized that this was a tide that could not be turned. “I sort of had to be dragged into the murder business,” he says. Morrison admits he had misgivings in moving from straight reporting to reporting mysteries. He says he learned a long time ago that “your face tells a story,” and you need “some sort of internal reaction to what you’re telling people or otherwise it won’t get through to them.”īut if you really want to understand Morrison’s newfound popularity, you have to look at something else too: his attitude, which is an exquisite balance of seriousness and self-parody, of the empathetic and the macabre, of a news reporter and Vincent Price. He is a serious journalist who has transitioned into the role of “star” in the genre of news entertainment, primarily those crime stories.Īnd if he has a distinctive way of writing lines and delivering them, he has an equally distinctive series of tics: the arched brows signaling incredulity, the skeptically cocked head, the wince at something that doesn’t quite compute. A warning? Certainly.”), is what in music would be called a crossover artist. Morrison, who delivers his reports in a deep and expressive baritone that soars and dips and writes them with a distinctive turn of phrase (“Outside, the night, in a full moon, bathed the great houses of delight and sin.” or “There is a letter, written more than 60 years ago - a prophecy? Perhaps. But then there has never been a reporter quite like Keith Morrison. Correspondents don’t typically invite impersonations either, but Morrison has had plenty, most famously Bill Hader on “Saturday Night Live.” And no other correspondent has prompted Buzzfeed to post 19 reasons why he is “Television’s Greatest Gift to Mankind” as it did about Morrison. Morrison has scads of them, including Lady Gaga, Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan. But for all that, the 69-year-old is not only busier than ever (“Dateline” filled 150 hours on NBC last year), he’s also suddenly achieved a kind of rock star cult status.Ĭorrespondents don’t typically have fans. The 6-foot-2, gaunt and copiously white-haired “Dateline” correspondent has been reporting for nearly 40 years, and he has seen and done just about everything - from hosting a morning show to anchoring the news to covering the protests in Tiananmen Square.

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