Terry Phillips

Terry Phillips is a journalist, author and media consultant. As a foreign correspondent, he covered events around the world for CBS News, and reported regularly for NPR, Monitor Radio and the NBC/ Mutual Broadcasting System.

Early Years

Phillips was born in Fresno, California. His father was a Greek refugee whose family fled Turkey during the post-World War I chaos. His mother was born in New York City, the daughter of Armenian immigrants from Turkey.

Phillips completed his high school education in San Jose, California, and then earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Santa Clara University in 1975. He spent his junior year at l’Institut d’Etudes Françaises in Aix-en-Provence, France, and is fluent in French. He did graduate studies in journalism at California State University in San Jose and attended the Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California.

Career

In 1976, Phillips began working at KTEH, the public television affiliate in Silicon Valley. He was in charge of the station’s video services department. He produced feature stories and presented documentary reports for such programs as “Tomorrow/Today,” an innovative science and technology magazine series on PBS.

Phillips operated the public access television station for Gill Cable TV in 1977. He took a one-year stint as press relations manager for the Pacific Telephone Company in 1979 before forming his own independent media production company.

Prompted by the devastating 1988 earthquake in Armenia, Phillips traveled to the Soviet Union and began reporting for NBC/Mutual radio. He was one of the first journalists to cover fighting in the Caucasus region of Nagorno-Karabagh and the border war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was named the network’s Eastern European correspondent, reporting dramatic changes in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania while based in Prague.

Following the 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait, Phillips reported the first Gulf conflict from Baghdad. He re-located to Moscow to cover the collapsing USSR and was dispatched to such hotspots as Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Haiti. In 1995, CBS News assigned him to report stories throughout the United States while based in the network’s Detroit bureau.

Phillips left daily news reporting in 1996 and entered the world of high technology. He was hired as public affairs director for Omnipoint Communications, a GSM wireless service provider. In that capacity, he also served as an international advocate for the GSM Association, a London-based trade organization for the world’s wireless operators. While at Omnipoint, Phillips led the department dealing with company communications, media relations and public affairs. He was a member of the President’s Council and published Wireless Etiquette (Omnipoint Books, 1999), the world’s first guide to the polite use of instant communications devices, which was written by Peter Laufer. He was a champion of wireless security, challenging false claims that GSM conversations were vulnerable to eavesdropping. In 1999, Omnipoint merged with VoiceStream Wireless (now part of T-Mobile).

Phillips moved back to California in 2000. There, he began a five-year investigation into the 1933 assassination of Ghevont Tourian, the Armenian Archbishop who was stabbed to death in a New York City church on Christmas Eve Sunday morning. That research led Phillips to write a historical novel, Murder at the Altar (Hye Books, 2008). This groundbreaking book is the first such work on a controversy which continues to divide Armenians worldwide. He continues to lecture on the history of this event, bringing together representatives from opposing groups to search for common ground and mutual understanding.

In 2005, Phillips returned to his birthplace, and for five years he hosted “Quality of Life,” an interview/news talk series on Valley Public Radio, the NPR stations in Central California. He brought together representatives of diverse points of view, providing a fair and balanced opportunity to discuss issues of public importance. Guest panels regularly comprised national and international experts from a wide range of fields, from politics to business and from sciences to the arts. In June 2009, he broadcast the program live from Yerevan, Armenia.

In February 2011, during a series of scandals involving NPR, Phillips wrote an op-ed piece critical of financial influences on news content. A week later, he was fired. This prompted public reaction from listeners. Phillips is the author of Off the Air: Thoughts About Our Quality of Life (Hye Books, 2011), a compilation of his radio commentaries.

Phillips is a regular contributor to the Hellenic Journal. For ten years, he co-hosted the Armenia Fund global telethon.