Inducted 2025
Cynthia Canty
executive producer, WKBD-TV
In her four-decade career, Cynthia Bruce Canty has left an impressive and indelible legacy in both television and radio, in her native Metro Detroit and throughout the State of Michigan.
Launching her career doing overnight newscasts for a small religious radio station in Detroit, she went on to serve as news director and morning-drive anchor for two of the Motor City’s most popular FM stations. She worked at WNIC and at WDTX as a trusted news source and as a lighthearted member of morning show teams.
Displaying a powerful dedication to career and family, she is believed to be the first radio newscaster in America ever to work from home, a satellite dish installed on her garage roof so she could be on maternity leave to care for her firstborn, Brendan. News crews descended on her house to cover the phenomenon.
She made the challenging transition to television, working her way from street reporter to nightly news anchor, editor and executive producer at Detroit’s WKBD-TV. There, she displayed a compassion for human-interest stories and a fearlessness to go anywhere, from the city’s Cass Corridor to an encampment of homeless men beneath the Ambassador Bridge.
After more than a dozen years at WKBD, Cynthia returned to radio as co-founder and host of “Stateside with Cynthia Canty,” a weekday public affairs hour heard on NPR affiliate Michigan Public Radio. She conducted more than 8,000 longform interviews during seven years as anchor — as many as five a day — for stations from Ann Arbor to Interlochen. She helped expose or maintained a focus on major Michigan stories including the Flint water crisis, the Larry Nassar sexual assault scandal, PFAS chemical contamination and the City of Detroit bankruptcy.
After Stateside, Cynthia anchored a series of public TV specials examining youth suicide and mental health initiatives in schools and communities.