According to his biography, Dahler's first reporting position was at
WGHP-TV in
High Point, North Carolina in 1982. He reported there for three years. He began as an unpaid intern for KENS-TV in San Antonio. Dahler joined CBS2 News on September 4, 2007, as weekend evening anchor. On May 27, 2008, the
Daily News reported that the station had decided to give Don the co-anchorage for the 12 noon and 6:00 p.m. newscasts, which paired him with veteran
Dana Tyler; all of this just five days after two-time alum
Jim Rosenfield was let go for the sake of budget cuts.
Steve Bartelstein, whom Dahler auditioned to replace at
WABC-TV after Bartelstein was fired, replaced Dahler as
Mary Calvi's weekend evening co-anchor. On September 8, 2011, it was announced that Dahler would move to weekends, as
Chris Wragge was returning to the local station from a 9-month stint as co-host of CBS' The Early Show. Dahler joined
ABC News in September 1999 as a National Correspondent for
Good Morning America. Since then, he has filed reports for all programs at ABC, including
Nightline,
Primetime,
20/20 Downtown,
Good Morning America and
World News Tonight. He has travelled to
Kosovo for war coverage and to
Afghanistan and Iraq for the same reason. He was embedded with the
101st Airborne during the initial invasion, and has returned for three other embeds with U.S. troops. In 2013, Dahler joined CBS News as a correspondent and left CBS in May 2020 to pursue writing full-time.
Major news story coverage Dahler reported on many high-profile news stories within the U.S. and abroad such as the
Columbine shootings in his native
Colorado. On
September 11, 2001, Dahler was the first network correspondent on the scene of the attack on the
World Trade Center in
New York City reporting live via telephone from his apartment—which was just blocks away from ground zero—a few moments after the first plane hit the towers. As he was one of the only reporters at ground zero when the planes hit, Dahler filed the first report of the South Tower's collapse mere seconds after it occurred. Two weeks later, he was one of the first American journalists travelling to Afghanistan before the U.S. began its bombing campaign against the
Taliban. In 2002, prior to the Iraq War, Dahler and a team from
Nightline, became the first journalists from the United States to successfully cross the
Syrian border into northern Iraq prior to the
Iraq War in more than a decade. ==Personal life==