Linda Mason

Linda Mason died peacefully on the night of Wednesday, October 28, 2026, surrounded by family, according to a statement from CBS News. She was 84. The network did not disclose a cause of death and none has been made public.

CBS News announced her death on October 29 and aired a tribute calling her a trailblazer for women in journalism and a pioneer behind the scenes over a career of nearly 50 years. Funeral or memorial arrangements had not been announced at the time of writing.

Linda Mason was born and grew up in Middletown, New York. She studied international relations at Brown University, graduating with honors in 1964, and went on to Syracuse University, where she was a university fellow and earned a master's degree in filmmaking in 1965.

Brown later gave her its William Rogers Award in 1991, given each year to the alumnus voted the most outstanding.

Mason joined CBS News in January 1966 as a radio desk assistant, at a time when most women in the newsroom were confined to secretarial work. She moved on to write news for WCBS-TV, the CBS station in New York, and was a writer and associate producer for the CBS Morning News from 1968 to 1970.

In 1971 she joined the CBS Evening News as a field producer, becoming the first woman to produce the broadcast. She was its senior producer from 1980 to 1986, spanning the anchorships of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

As executive producer of CBS News Sunday Morning from 1987 to 1992, and of the network's weekend broadcasts from 1986, she took the program on the road for some of the biggest stories of the period: from the Soviet Union during President Ronald Reagan's first visit, from Japan for the funeral of Emperor Hirohito, and from China just before the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

She then moved into management, serving as vice president of public affairs and as executive producer of the documentary series CBS Reports, the news magazine Eye to Eye, and the primetime specials 60 Minutes... 25 Years and 60 Minutes at 30. In January 2005 she was named senior vice president of standards and special projects, responsible for the CBS News standards handbook, the CBS News Archives, the internship and minority recruiting programs, and the network's role in the National Election Pool exit polling consortium. She retired after 47 years at the network.

Professionally she kept the name Linda Mason, but at home she was Linda Aminoff. She and her husband, Cary Aminoff, had two daughters and lived in Riverdale in the Bronx. She was the first woman in the CBS news department to have a baby, and negotiated six months of maternity leave with her bosses; she later said her daughters always knew they could phone her at work, even in Cronkite's office.

In 2023 she published Speak Up: Breaking the Glass Ceiling at CBS News, a memoir with a foreword by Connie Chung that described her career and the lessons she drew from it: work hard, ask questions and speak up about what comes next.

Mason was among the first women to produce a network evening newscast in the United States and spent her career opening roles at CBS News that had never been held by a woman. Her work earned 13 Emmy Awards, three Peabody Awards, an Edward R. Murrow Award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and the Grand Prize of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. As head of standards she shaped the rules by which the network reported the news, and her memoir set out her example for a new generation of women in media.