By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 7, 2007; C01

NEW YORK -- Byron Pitts was chatting with students at a Harlem charter school the day before a recent visit by President Bush when the CBS correspondent had a realization: They viewed him as just another empty suit who couldn't possibly understand their problems. Little did they know.

"When I was your age," he told them, "I couldn't read."

That was no exaggeration. When Pitts was 12, officials at Baltimore's Archbishop Curley High School summoned his mother to report that tests had determined her son was "functionally illiterate." She broke into tears.

"It was humiliating. It was awful," Pitts says. "You sort of live your life in disguise. . . . When you live in the 'hood, you have to wear a mask." Pitts didn't even consider his inability to read his biggest problem; he was far more upset over his constant stuttering.

How Pitts overcame that inauspicious start to excel in a profession built on writing and speaking is as good a story as any that he has covered. To this day, at a public event he will fight to get one of the first copies of a press release because he needs time to digest it. He says his wife can finish a book three or four times as fast as he can.

"I'm not ashamed of my reading difficulties, but I'm aware of my slowness," says Pitts, 46.

When he was young, Pitts says, he memorized his reading assignments with help from an older brother and sister as they did their homework at the kitchen table. If he had to read aloud in class, he would commit a few sentences to memory and then raise his hand at the right moment. Since he was quiet and polite, Pitts says, teachers mostly left him alone.

His mother, Clarice, who after a divorce raised the kids as a single mother, says she knew Byron had problems in the third grade, but says authorities at his Catholic school conducted psychological tests and said they could find no problem. At home young Pitts preferred watching television; the only reading material regularly in the house, he says, was Ebony, Jet and the Bible.

After the diagnosis at 12, she sent away for a machine that her son had seen advertised on television that provided help with phonics and other basic reading skills.

Pitts says he began to make progress after that and became a B student in high school. His mother, who was working in a factory making London Fog raincoats, had something to do with his improved grades.

"I told him he couldn't play Little League football unless he got a B or above," she says. "I had the same rule in high school. He really started studying hard because he wanted to play football."

But Pitts remained in remedial reading classes, and things became harder when he got to Ohio Wesleyan University. As he struggled on academic probation, a freshman English teacher told him: "Mr. Pitts, you're wasting my time and the government's money. You're not Ohio Wesleyan material and you shouldn't be here." Pitts walked away in tears and went to the administrative office the next day to withdraw.

Ulle Lewes, who ran the writing resource center, happened to be walking by. "I saw this young man very despondent on the steps," she says. When Lewes asked him what was wrong, he showed her the research paper that had elicited the scolding. She agreed to help him, and soon concluded that Pitts had a fine analytical mind but poor training.

"What he did was extraordinary," Lewes says. "I loved his commitment. It was a beautiful thing in someone so young. . . . That cruel freshman teacher almost squashed him."

Pitts also got help from a fellow dorm resident, Peter Holthe, who agreed to help correct his papers. "He wanted to be a journalist, but he didn't have the writing skills," Holthe recalls.

They roomed together during sophomore year, when Pitts decided to pursue a broadcasting career. "He had a horrible stuttering problem," Holthe says. "I said: 'Okay, dude, this is harder. You've got to learn one new word from the dictionary each day and pronounce it properly, and we're going to play like you're on the radio.' "

Holthe never imagined that Pitts could work for a major network: "He was a black kid from the wrong side of the tracks in Baltimore. I'm a privileged white boy from Minnesota. I thought we could get him to the point where he'd be functional in society."

After graduation, Pitts says: "I told my mother I'm going to be a network correspondent by age 35. We prayed about it." While he was working at Atlanta's WSB-TV, "CBS called on October 22, 1996, the day after I turned 36."

Some of the early scars still linger. Pitts says he still stutters from time to time. And he has not forgiven his father for leaving the family when he was 7, several years before his parents divorced. "I've told him: 'When I was a boy, you didn't have time for me. Now that I'm a man, I don't have time for you.' "

Pitts, who has now put three of his four children through college, hasn't forgotten his early struggles. He spoke about his early difficulties when he gave a commencement address at Ohio Wesleyan last year.

He insists he is not angry about the school system failing him. "There are stepping stones in life," Pitts says. "Everything you perceive as bad is God preparing you for some task."

Nothing frustrates David Faber more than when someone says of one of his scoops: "Oh yeah, you aggressively picked up the phone."

The CNBC reporter beat the world on Tuesday morning by disclosing that Rupert Murdoch was trying to buy the Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones. Faber nailed that story the way he gets most of his exclusives: by working the elite circle of bankers, lawyers and executives who are involved in such deals.

"It starts with one person saying one tiny thing, and then another person gives me something, and then I call a third person," Faber says. After talking to five sources on the bid to buy Dow Jones, he called Murdoch's News Corp. for comment. "People called and told Rupert, 'Faber's got it,' " he says. In this case he beat one of his biggest competitors -- the Journal itself -- on a story unfolding in its building.

After 13 years at CNBC, Faber has Wall Street pretty well wired. In recent months, he broke news of the biggest leveraged buyout in history -- a $45 billion takeover of the Texas energy firm TXU -- and the Blackstone Group deciding to go public with a $4 billion offering.

But his role has broadened since the late 1990s, when he and Joe Kernen bantered about stocks on the morning show "Squawk Box" during the market boom that sent CNBC's ratings ever higher -- until the bubble burst. Faber left the program last year, and was relieved to do so when the start time was moved up to 6 a.m.

Now he occasionally appears on NBC and hosts the monthly CNBC magazine show "Business Nation," where he is working on a story on the faltering music industry. He books interviews with top corporate executives, such as his chat last week with Carl Icahn. And Faber has done five documentaries for the cable network, the most watched of which -- "The Age of Wal-Mart" -- won a Peabody and a Dupont award. While taping a documentary on the fall of WorldCom, he landed an interview on a Mississippi street with CEO Bernard Ebbers -- which was later used in the trial that convicted Ebbers in an $11 billion fraud.

At times he has thought of giving up journalism for investment banking. "I've been watching people amassing enormous wealth, people I know pretty well," Faber says. But he remains at CNBC's Englewood, N.J., headquarters, trying to unearth the next big deal.

"I love the hunt," Faber says. "I love breaking stories. I still love it."

Footnote: How does a newspaper justify telling its journalists not to talk to other journalists? Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger urged his staff to refer all media calls to spokesman Robert Christie. Christie says such orders are "typical" because "Dow Jones is the target of a potential acquisition." But that didn't happen when Tribune Co. was sold recently, and is disappointing for a company whose reporters ask other people to talk every day.