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It took about seven years for Daniel Schorr to tire of being a journalist for Jewish media.

The distaste of digesting the news of the emerging Holocaust, combined with what he saw as the blinkered parochialism of Jewish news, led him to quit the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 1941.

Daniel Schorr

But Schorr never stopped being a Jewish journalist — events and his conscience would not let him.

Schorr, the crusading broadcast journalist who died July 23 at 93, is best known for his clashes with the powerful, including his employers and even a U.S. president.

But he never forgot his roots in print and parochial journalism, recalling his stint with the Jewish Daily Bulletin, JTA’s daily newspaper, and then with JTA in his 2001 autobiography, “Staying Tuned, a Life in Journalism.”

His job at JTA was “cable rewrite”: He would convert the reports condensed from “cables,” written to save money when cable operators charged by the word, to everyday English.

“At JTA we received chilling cable reports of anti-Semitic depredations in Europe from refugees, Jewish organizations and neutral travelers,” he wrote. “These reports occasioned screaming headlines in the Yiddish press, but were largely ignored by the general newspapers.”

By 1941, Schorr had had enough, and found his complaints at the wrong end of Jacob Landau, JTA’s founder.

“After seven years of this I began to bridle about this contorted view of a world in crisis,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I made my discomfort evident enough so that Landau finally suggested it might be time for me to move on.”

Schorr never quite won the job he longed for throughout his youth — a correspondency with the New York Times.

As a freelancer in 1953 for the Times, he filed thorough coverage of an outbreak of floods in the Netherlands, earning front-page play and the respect of the paper’s managers.

Yet when Edward R. Murrow, the legendary CBS newsman, offered Schorr a job, Schorr cabled the Times to ask his editors what they thought. They told him to accept the offer.

Schorr opened up the CBS Moscow bureau and scored the first televised interview with the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khruschev, in 1955. And he was the first to obtain President Richard Nixon’s enemies list, released during the Watergate hearings in 1973, of 20 people the president hoped to “screw” through tax audits.

Schorr immediately read the list on air, gasping when he reached No. 17: himself. He was listed as a “real media enemy.”

He later said it was one of his proudest moments.

More vexing for him was the reaction by CBS in 1976 when he obtained a congressional report showing that the CIA had engaged in massive domestic spying. CBS would not allow him to report the scoop, so he handed it to the Village Voice. The FBI launched a probe, and he risked a contempt charge for refusing to reveal his source. CBS eventually cut him off.

Schorr landed at CNN at its inception in 1979, until he fell out with founder Ted Turner in 1985 over Schorr’s refusal to accommodate former politicians as commentators. After that he worked for NPR, providing commentaries.

Schorr is survived by his wife of 43 years, Lisbeth, a son, Jonathan, a daughter, Lisa, and one grandchild.

JTA correspondent Tom Tugend in Los Angeles contributed to this report.