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brendan.keefe@wcpo.com
Multiple Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist Brendan Keefe joined WCPO in the fall of 2007. He co-anchors 9 News at 5:30 every weeknight with Tanya O'Rourke. Brendan also works as a "multi media journalist," shooting, writing, producing, and editing his own reports for WCPO's special projects unit and the I-Team.
Brendan was awarded three 2008 Emmys from the Ohio Valley Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. His investigation of Ohio's Bureau of Workers Compensation denying benefits to police officers seriously injured in the line of duty won an Investigative Reporting Emmy, and First Place - Best Enterprise Reporting from the Ohio Associated Press.
Previous to moving to Cincinnati, Brendan worked for New York's WCBS-TV as a correspondent. He won a 2006 NY Emmy Award for his continuing coverage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. Brendan has covered nearly a dozen hurricanes in his career. He also won a NY Emmy award for live coverage of the Northeast Blackout from a darkened Times Square.
War Correspondent
Brendan has completed three combat reporting tours in the Middle East. He reported from the rooftops of Kuwait City as U.S. Forces invaded Iraq in 2003. Brendan returned to the region in April 2004 when he and a photographer were embedded with a U.S. Army Reserve unit from New York. During the deadliest month for I.E.D. attacks, Brendan endured a 600-mile convoy from Kuwait to Kirkuk in Northern Iraq. His Army humvee passed through battle zones in Nasiriyah, Baghdad, Taji, Balad, Samara, and Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit. The military convoy was attacked by insurgents near Abu Ghraib while traveling on the treacherous road between Baghdad airport and the city center. A truck in the column was hit by a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) and one soldier survived a gunshot wound from an insurgent's AK-47, but all the soldiers survived and Brendan was not hurt.
Brendan and his crew spent a month in Iraq chronicling sacrifices made by the "citizen soldiers" of the Army Reserve. He returned to their base in Kirkuk in January 2005 and joined them on another dangerous convoy to Chemical Ali's former summer retreat. His Iraq reporting won the coveted Silurian Award from the nation's oldest press club.
Brendan's international assignments have also taken him to Madrid to cover the Al Qaeda terrorist bombings of commuter trains. He covered the national elections in Spain three days later when voters ousted the ruling party as a direct result of the terror attacks.
Street Reporter
Brendan's investigation of parking abuses by NYPD officers in their personal cars earned him two more New York Emmy nominations and landed him in jail. The series of investigative reports resulted in severe harassment by police officers, including threats to his family and a bogus arrest, even though Brendan had previously served for two years as an NYPD auxiliary police officer patrolling Manhattan's 13th Precinct. In 2008, he was fully vindicated when Mayor Bloomberg revoked thousands of city employee parking permits as a direct result of Brendan's investigation.
Previous to WCBS-TV, Brendan worked as a special projects reporter for the NBC affiliate in Houston, Texas from 1997-2002. He covered the collapse of Enron and other major stories such as the drowning of five children by their own mother, Andrea Yates. Brendan flew regularly in Chopper 2 as a helicopter reporter above the Lone Star state. He also flew twice in zero gravity with NASA aboard the KC-135 "Vomit Comet." Brendan covered the space shuttle launch of Sen. John Glenn and the impeachment vote against President Bill Clinton. In 2000, He traveled with then-Governor George W. Bush in his first campaign for president. Brendan won five Suncoast Emmy awards while in Houston, including two for an underwater cave diving documentary he shot alone while on vacation in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Storyteller
Prior to his work in Texas, Brendan was an anchor and reporter for WFSB-TV, the CBS affiliate in Hartford, Connecticut. He anchored the weekday morning news from 1995 - 1997. Brendan's report on a paralyzed high school girl's secret plan to walk into her junior prom earned a Boston-New England Emmy Award. He also covered development of the Navy's Seawolf submarine and spent two days 800 feet below the Atlantic Ocean aboard a Los Angeles class attack sub.
In 1994 and 1995, Brendan was a reporter for WJXT-TV, the former CBS affiliate in Jacksonville, Florida. He started as an investigative reporter uncovering government waste and abuse as the "The Whistleblower." Later, Brendan was assigned as a military affairs reporter covering four major Navy bases.
Brendan worked for the CBS affiliate in Grand Rapids/Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1992 and 1993. He was bureau chief of the station's Battle Creek newsroom. While there, he provided gavel-to-gavel coverage of a major murder trial. The defendant, a former police officer and criminology professor, was convicted of executing his own wife, the local ABC morning anchorwoman. Brendan also flew an F-16 fighter jet with the Air Force Thunderbirds in 1993.
Brendan began his broadcast journalism career in Rockford, Illinois where he reported and anchored for WREX-TV, then an ABC affiliate. His yearlong investigation of the Ku Klux Klan nearly landed him in the hospital when he was attacked by masked white supremacists at the same rally where Geraldo Rivera was assaulted. Brendan started there as a news photographer, skills that have served him well later in his career as a multi-media journalist for WCPO Networks.
Family Matters
A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, Brendan was raised in North Haven, Connecticut with his eight brothers and sisters. Two of his brothers died of cancer, and Brendan volunteers with The Cure Starts Now. He earned a bachelors degree in English Literature from Kenyon College in Ohio where he also created Kenyon College Television. Brendan's wife Tiffany was a network news writer before the couple moved to the Tri-State to start a family. Tiffany, Brendan and their son Ian reside in Anderson Township.
