What was Morley Safer's Net Worth?
Morley Safer was a Canadian-born American news reporter and television correspondent who had a net worth of $25 million at the time of his death in 2016. As we describe at the end of this article, a good portion of Morley Safer's net worth was was the value of his Park Avenue carriage house. This property, which is still owned by his widow, is likely worth north of $10 million.
Morley Safer was best known for his long-running tenure on the newsmagazine program "60 Minutes." Across his 60-plus-year broadcast journalism career, he won 12 Emmy Awards, three Peabody Awards, and two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, among many other honors. Safer passed away in 2016 one week after announcing his retirement from CBS.
Morley Safer died on May 19, 2016 at the age of 84.
Early Life and Education
Morley Safer was born on November 8, 1931 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Austrian-Jewish parents Anna and Max. He had an older brother named Leon and an older sister named Esther. Safer was educated at Harbord Collegiate Institute and Bloor Collegiate Institute before briefly attending the University of Western Ontario. He ultimately dropped out of college to pursue his career as a newspaper reporter.
Career Beginnings
Safer started his career in journalism as a reporter for various Ontario-based newspapers, including the Toronto Telegram and the Woodstock Sentinel-Review. He also worked for some papers in England, such as Oxford Mail and Reuters.
CBC
In the latter half of the 1950s, Safer became a correspondent and producer for the CBC. Among his first projects with the network was to produce "CBC News Magazine," on which he made his first on-screen appearance as a journalist in 1956. Later, while still with the CBC in the early 1960s, Safer began working from London, where he covered major international events such as the Algerian War.
CBS
Safer was hired by CBS in 1964 to become a London-based correspondent. The year after that, he became the first full-time staff reporter of the CBS News bureau in Saigon to report on the evolving military conflict in Vietnam. Safer's reports from Vietnam were highly controversial for exposing the barbarity of the US's involvement in the country, which upset President Johnson and other political and military leaders intent on depicting American soldiers as heroes. By 1967, Safer was named the CBS News bureau chief in London, where he covered such other major international conflicts as the Nigerian Civil War and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Additionally, he and his news team became the first US-based journalists to report from inside Communist China, which they did in a 1967 special report entitled "Morley Safer's Red China Diary."
In 1970, Safer succeeded Harry Reasoner as a reporter on the CBS newsmagazine program "60 Minutes," then in its third year on television. He would go on to become the show's longest-serving reporter with a tenure lasting 46 years. During that time, Safer was joined by such fellow reporters as Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Diane Sawyer, and Ed Bradley. Known for his genial style of interviewing, Safer covered both deadly serious stories and more lightweight, eccentric ones. In the former category was the story of Lenell Geter, an aerospace engineer who was given a life sentence for robbery in Texas. Through his investigation, which uncovered racial bias and factual inconsistencies in the case, Safer helped get Geter released from prison. Among his other notable "60 Minutes" features was his 1975 interview with First Lady Betty Ford. Safer retired from CBS in May of 2016.
Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images
Honors and Awards
Safer received a surfeit of accolades for his work in broadcast journalism. Among them were 12 Emmy Awards, including wins for such "60 Minutes" stories as his Gulf of Tonkin report and his story on Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek. Safer also received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy. Elsewhere, he won three Peabody Awards, three Overseas Press Awards, and two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards. In 1993, Safer received Brown University's Welles Hangen Award for Superior Achievement in Journalism. His other accolades included the 2003 George Polk Memorial Career Achievement Award, from Long Island University.
Personal Life and Death
In 1968, Safer married anthropology student Jane Fearer while he was serving as the CBS News bureau chief in London. The couple had a daughter named Sarah who became a freelance journalist.
Just a week after announcing his retirement from CBS in May of 2016, Safer passed away from pneumonia at his home in New York City. He is interred at Roselawn Avenue Cemetery in his hometown of Toronto.
Real Estate
Morley and his wife of many decades Jane Fearer owned two primary properties on the east coast. Their main home was 4,300 square-foot, two-story carriage house near Park Avenue which was acquired in 1996 for $2.2 million. This property is likely worth at least $10 million today. Perhaps much more.
For over three decades they owned a country cottage in the town of Chester, Connecticut. Morley's heirs listed this home for sale in September 2020 for $1.45 million.
