Steve Osunsami
Steve Osunsami is an award-winning senior national correspondent for ABC News based in Atlanta, Georgia. He reports for “World News Tonight with David Muir,” “Good Morning America,” “Nightline,” ABC News Live and other ABC News broadcasts, platforms, special events and primetime specials. He began his career at ABC News in 1997. Osunsami is one of the network’s longest-serving correspondents.
For nearly three decades, Osunsami has reported on various breaking, investigative, legal, political, medical and human-interest events. His work focuses greatly on the social justice issues of our time: racial discrimination, the wrongly imprisoned, gay marriage, culture wars, and the debate over the policing of Black and brown communities.
Most recently, Osunsami led a team that spent from 2023 through 2024 investigating the rise in diabetic limb amputations across America and, in particular, discovering why these life-altering surgeries were happening more often in minority communities.
In 2021, former President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter selected Osunsami for what would become their final television interview. The news special chronicled their life and successful marriage. That same year, Osunsami led the team investigating the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, producing a groundbreaking podcast for ABC News Audio, telling the story to a mass audience for the first time.
In the summer of 2020, Osunsami reported on the racial unrest following the police killing of George Floyd for various ABC News primetime specials. He also reported extensively on the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic effects of the statewide shutdowns, and the search for a vaccine throughout 2020.
In August of 2014, he was the first network reporter on the scene of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and led the network’s coverage of the event and subsequent civil unrest. He was also part of ABC News’ Edward R. Murrow Award-winning reporting team that covered the Baltimore riots in 2015 after the arrest and death of Freddie Gray. That same year, Osunsami led coverage of the racially explosive police shooting death of Walter Scott in South Carolina. He also led the network’s coverage of the mass shooting by a white supremacist inside a historic Black church in Charleston. Osunsami then went on to lead the reporting on South Carolina’s decision to remove the Confederate battle flag from their statehouse, a story he followed for nearly two decades.
In 2000, Osunsami was the first ABC News reporter on the ground in Florida during the presidential election recount. Twenty years later, in 2020, he led the network’s reporting on the hotly debated elections in Georgia, where the vote gave control of the U.S. Congress to Democrats and helped elect former President Joe Biden.
In 1998, Osunsami began filing regular reports for “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings,” primarily covering the southeastern U.S. That year, he began reporting on the first hate crime leading to murder of his network career: the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas. Osunsami interviewed the white supremacist convicted in the killing, while the killer was on death row.
Osunsami also reported on major weather tragedies, including more than two dozen hurricanes over the years. He covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the struggle to rebuild New Orleans after the storm nearly destroyed the city. He also reported on the Alabama tornados that killed more than 200 people in 2011.
Osunsami’s extensive feature reporting has covered the issue of missing Black children who are ignored by police and the press. He has also reported on stories of survival and resiliency.
Osunsami was a correspondent for the Emmy® Award-winning broadcast of “ABC 2000: The Millennium,” and his work has received dozens of awards since, from dupont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, the Society for Professional Journalists, The Webbys, and the Columbia School of Journalism, when they recognized his insightful and consistent reporting on racial and ethnic issues in 2002. At the 2023 News and Documentary Emmy Awards, he was inducted into the Silver Circle Honor Society by the National Television Academy. He’s also an award-winning television news script writer.
Prior to joining ABC News, Osunsami was a reporter in Seattle for the ABC affiliate KOMO-TV and a reporter and substitute anchor for the NBC affiliate WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was recognized with several awards from the Associated Press and the Michigan Association of Broadcasters. He began his career in journalism as a reporter at WREX-TV in Rockford, Illinois.
Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Peoria, Illinois, Osunsami graduated from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana with a Bachelor of Science in journalism. He wrote for the school’s newspaper and is a member of the paper’s Hall of Fame. The son of Nigerian immigrants, he participated in the Head Start preschool program for children in poverty and, in his adulthood, has received awards from the program. He is a prostate cancer survivor and is married to Joe Remillard, an artist and art professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
