Mark Litke

Alumni

Mark Litke is an award-winning television correspondent with five decades of experience producing and reporting from around the world.

Litke, who studied at Berkeley Journalism in the early 1970s says, “I owe much of my early success to a remarkable group of professionals-turned-professors — Edwin Bayley, Andrew Stern, Bernard Taper and David Littlejohn. My career simply would not have happened without their guidance, motivation and inspiration. Though retired for the past 10 years, I am fortunate to be in a position today to give something back and pay something forward.”

In 2022, Litke established an endowed fellowship in international reporting at Berkeley Journalism, motivated by a mixture of concern and hope over the future of international reporting in broadcast and visual journalism.

Whether the annual fellowship is used to fund a documentary project, purchase or rent video production equipment, pay for international airfare and accommodations, or introduce foreign students to the extraordinary opportunities at Berkeley, Litke said he hopes it will make it easier for students to pursue international journalism careers.

Learn more about the fellowship here.

Mark Litke’s Extraordinary Career
As a Chief Asia Correspondent for ABC News, Litke provided extensive coverage of the historic events that have shaped modern China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Iraq and South Africa.

As a correspondent in China, Litke covered the rise of China’s global influence from the days of the Tiananmen democracy movement through the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. In Korea, Litke was repeatedly on the front lines covering the rise and fall of tensions on the Korean peninsula.

In India, he was among the first to report the long simmering Sikh rebellion and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He was also among the first reporters to reach the scenes of some of the world’s most catastrophic events of recent decades, including India’s Bhopal gas disaster, Japan’s Kobe earthquake, and Southeast Asia’s 2004 Tsunami.

In 2004, Litke won his fifth national Emmy Award for his investigative report on the violent “Tiger Force” campaign conducted by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. He was also awarded Emmys for his coverage of Thailand’s drug wars, the highjack of Pan Am Flight 73 in Pakistan, the fall of Indonesia’s President Suharto and the ABC News Millennium special, during which Litke provided live reports from Shanghai, China.

After retiring from ABC News, Litke produced a series of reports from Southeast Asia for the PBS program “World Focus”– topics included the lingering impact of the defoliant Agent Orange on the people of Vietnam, the struggle for a reproductive rights law in the Philippines, and Thailand’s decades-long Muslim insurgency. For the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, Litke wrote and produced a one hour special for Bloomberg TV–“Tragedy &
Triumph: Wall Street after 9/11”.

Litke is also the recipient of two Peabody Awards, three Overseas Press Club Awards, a National Headliner Award, and the South Asian Journalism Award.

After attending the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Litke began his career in 1971 as an assignment editor at KPIX-TV in San Francisco. From 1973 to 1975, he was a producer/reporter at KING-TV in Seattle. He then moved to Los Angeles in 1975 as a producer for KNXT (where he won his first Los Angeles area Emmy award for producing and writing). He also worked in Los Angeles as a field producer for ABC News and an occasional freelance writer and photographer.

Litke formally joined ABC News in 1979 as a Tokyo-based producer for Asia. He was named an on-air correspondent for Tokyo in 1980. He covered Asia for the next 11 years from ABC’s base in Hong Kong. Following a two-year stint at ABC’s London bureau, Litke returned to Asia. He was based in Tokyo for another eight years and Hong Kong for another nine years. He now lives with his wife Maria “Tippin” Coscolluela in New York City. Both of their children were born in
Asia. Both now live in Brooklyn.

AWARDS & HONORS

PUBLICATIONS & OTHER WORK