SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Longtime Bay Area TV news anchor and reporter Leslie Griffith has died.
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An unidentified family member told KTVU, Griffith's former station of 22 years, that Griffith died at her home in Mexico on Wednesday. Griffith had contended with serious effects of Lyme disease since 2015, her family told the station.
Griffith wrote for The Associated Press and The Denver Post before eventually spending more than two decades at KTVU as a reporter and then an anchor. She co-anchored the station's 10 p.m. newscast from 1998 until leaving the station in 2006.
After exiting KTVU, Griffith turned a critical eye to the state of broadcast journalism and media as a writer on the Huffington Post's contributors page, the San Francisco Chronicle's digital "City Brights" section, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Truthout and even her self-named blog.
The Tombala, Texas native graduated from Sam Houston State before pursuing an award-winning journalism career. Griffith won nine local Emmy awards, a pair of RTDNA Edward R. Murrow Awards and the 2005 Associated Press Anchor of the Year award.
That same year, she established the Leslie R. Griffith Women of Courage Scholarship. She told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time that she understood “what just a few thousand dollars can do” after earning her degree as a single mother. Griffith, who was 18 when her first child was born, stressed to participants in a Bay Area high school’s program for student mothers that year that they weren’t failures, and that the woman the students saw on their televisions was “no different” than them.
"I told the kids today, 'Don't ever let it occur to you.' You just do what you have to do," she told the paper in a story about the students' graduation. "I also tell them that I wouldn't be the woman that I am today if it had not been for the hardships."
Griffith was survived by her two children and two grandchildren.
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