Early life Hockenberry was born in
Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in
Vestal, New York and
East Grand Rapids, Michigan. He graduated in 1974 from
East Grand Rapids High School in
East Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1976, he was paralyzed while
hitchhiking on the
Pennsylvania Turnpike. The driver of the car fell asleep and crashed, killing herself. Hockenberry's spinal cord was damaged, and he remains paralyzed without sensation or voluntary movement from the mid-chest down. At the time he was a mathematics major at the
University of Chicago, but after his spinal cord injury, he transferred to the
University of Oregon in 1980 and studied
harpsichord and
piano.
Journalism career Hockenberry started his career as a volunteer for the
National Public Radio affiliate
KLCC in
Eugene, Oregon. In 1981, he moved to
Washington, D.C., where he was a newscaster. From 1989 to 1990 he hosted a two-hour nightly news show called
HEAT with John Hockenberry. During his 15 years with NPR, he covered many areas of the world, including an assignment as a Middle East correspondent, reporting on the
Persian Gulf War in 1991 and 1992. Beginning in November 1991 he served as the first host of NPR's
Talk of the Nation. After leaving NPR in 1992, Hockenberry also worked for
ABC News series
Day One from 1993 to 1995, covering the
civil war in Somalia and the
early days of al-Qaeda in
Afghanistan, before joining
Dateline NBC as a correspondent in 1996. In 1995, Hockenberry published his memoir
Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence. In 1996 he appeared
off-Broadway in his one-man autobiographical play,
Spoke Man. From 1996 to 1997 he hosted
Edgewise, an eclectic news magazine program that aired on
MSNBC. In 1999, he hosted
Hockenberry, a show which aired on MSNBC for six months. He reported on the
Kosovo War in 1999. His weekly radio commentaries aired on the nationally broadcast public radio program
The Infinite Mind from 1998 to 2008. He also served as host on
The DNA Files for the series airing in 1998, 2001, and 2007. He began developing
The Takeaway in 2007 and hosted the show from its 2008 premiere until August 2017. Hockenberry has narrated several nonfiction projects on
healthcare, including
Nova series
Survivor M.D.: Hearts & Minds, Who Cares: Chronic Illness in America, Remaking American Medicine. He also narrated the
eugenics documentary,
War Against the Weak. He has written for
The New York Times,
The New Yorker,
I.D.,
Wired,
The Columbia Journalism Review,
Details, and
The Washington Post. He published his first novel,
A River Out of Eden, in 2002, and he has written about "The Blogs of War" in
Wired magazine. In May 2006, he began writing his own blog, "The Blogenberry". On April 2, 2008, he hosted the premiere of the series
Nanotechnology: The Power of Small, discussing the impact of nanotechnology as concerns the general public. Hockenberry has appeared as presenter and moderator at numerous design and idea conferences around the nation including the Aspen Design Summit,
The TED conference, the
World Science Festival, and the
Aspen Comedy Festival. He also regularly speaks on media, journalism, and disability issues. He was one of the founding inductees to the Spinal Cord Injury Hall of Fame in 2005. In a
New York Magazine exposé, published December 1, 2017, journalist
Suki Kim accused Hockenberry of sexually harassing her and other women he had worked with on
The Takeaway.
Media criticism In 2005 he wrote a scathing review of the Academy Award-winning film
Million Dollar Baby called "And the Loser Is..." The review was submitted to a disability website with the title "Million Dollar Bigot" as an exclusive feature. The essay was discussed in news articles globally, and Hockenberry was interviewed about it on
FAIR's weekly news show
Counterspin. A short documentary film was made, also called
Million Dollar Bigot, completed on July 13, 2005, featuring Hockenberry as well as many other disability activists. Hockenberry wrote in the January 2008
Technology Review magazine that on the Sunday after the
September 11 attacks he was pitching stories on the origins of
al Qaeda and
Islamic fundamentalism. He wrote that then-NBC programming chief
Jeff Zucker, who came into a meeting Hockenberry was having with
Dateline executive producer David Corvo, said
Dateline should instead focus on the firefighters and perhaps ride along with them à la
COPS, a Fox reality series. According to Hockenberry, Zucker said "that he had no time for any subtitled interviews with jihadists raging about Palestine." Hockenberry has further claimed that
General Electric, NBC's parent company, discouraged him from talking to the
Bin Laden family about their estranged family member. Hockenberry says that he asked GE, which does business with the Bin Laden family company, to help him get in contact with them. Instead, a PR executive called Hockenberry's hotel room in Saudi Arabia and read him a statement about how GE didn't see its "valuable business relationship" with the
Bin Laden Group as having anything to do with
Dateline. In another instance, Hockenberry claimed a story he did about a
Weather Underground member would not appear on the Sunday edition of
Dateline unless the 1960s family drama
American Dreams, which followed
Dateline in the schedule at the time, did a show about "protesters or something." ==Personal life==