Is David Muir Related to John Muir?
David Muir is an award winning journalist, best known as the anchor for ABC World New Tonight, and as co-host of 20/20. Though Muir is a common Scottish surname, there are few famous people who share the moniker, leading many to wonder whether or not David Muir is related to John Muir.
David Muir is not related to John Muir. Though they share the same last name, there is no known genealogical connection between the news reporter and the late naturalist, who passed away in 1914.
Read more below about David Muir, John Muir, and what the two men have in common.
Childhood Dreams
David Muir is one of the most respected journalists in America. He was born in 1973 to Ronald and Pat (nee Mills) in Syracuse, New York.
David Muir knew he wanted to be a journalist since he was a child, admiring newscasters such as the legendary Peter Jennings, and Ron Curtis, a local newscaster in Muir’s city. He was so inspired, he even wrote a letter to Curtis when he was 12-years old, with the news anchor responding, “Competition in television news is keen. There’s always room for the right person. It could be you.”
College and the Road to Reporting
By the time he was in his mid-teens, David Muir was an intern at his local new station and had cemented his decision to pursue a career in journalism. Muir attended Ithaca College, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1995.
During the early years of his career, Muir worked at WTVH-TV in Syracuse before moving to WCVB-TV in Boston. It was at WCVB-TV that Muir rose to prominence and his award-winning work tracing the movements of the September 11th hijackers.
In 2003, Muir joined ABC, one of the Big Three television networks, and since joining the network, he has hosted multiple shows and become one of their most prominent anchors. Known for his reporting from the field across the globe, the anchor has won multiple Emmy Awards.
Anchoring and Accuracy
Since 2014, Muir has been the anchor on World New Tonight with David Muir, which has been a ratings winner for the network. Despite reporting for several decades, the news anchor shows no signs of slowing down, often working seven days a week to make sure the news coverage is accurate and impartial.
Speaking of the show and his team, Muir said, “I think that in this era, where people are really hungry for someone that they can trust and a team they can trust, that it’s just something they sense in their gut. And we go out there and try to earn that trust every single night. And we’re not perfect. One of the great gifts of this job is that you can go out the next night and give it your best shot again. But we never forget that we’re reporting to a divided country.”
You can watch David Muir discuss his career with Jimmy Kimmel in the YouTube video below.
“John of the Mountains”
Long before David Muir was reporting the nightly news to homes across America, John Muir was educating people in a different way. Though he lacked the platform of broadcast television, John Muir wrote over a dozen books and hundreds of newspaper articles that chronicled his world travels and naturalist beliefs.
John Muir was one of the major proponents of national parks. Having studied botany and geology at the University of Wisconsin, Muir inititally intended to become an inventor, but a life-changing injury forced him to focus on his writing and travels.
Throughout his career, Muir was directly involved in helping to preserve Yosemite, Mount Rainier, Sequoia and the Grand Canyon by having them designated national parks, as well as helping to establish the US Forest Service. Though Muir passed away in 1914, the John Muir Institute aims to carry on his legacy, with their mission stating, “At the Muir Institute, we aim to honor the ongoing legacy of John Muir by applying his conservationist ideals and passion towards solving some of the 21st century’s most challenging environmental and climate problems.
Enlightenment Across the Ages
Though David Muir and John Muir are not related, both have made indelible impacts on their nation, and enlightened their watchers and readers respectively to the things happening in the world around them.
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