Charles Wheeler

I am not going to say anything about the death of Sir Charles Wheeler.Reading the many tributes that have already been written,he seems to have a been a pioneer of news reporting.

Mark Thompson refers to him as

legend"

adding

His integrity, his authority and his humanity graced the BBC's airwaves over many decades,......He is utterly irreplaceable but like everyone else, I am privileged to have worked with him."

Mark Damazer called him a magnificent man who "embodied all that is best in the BBC's journalism".He had a brilliant eye and an unequalled ability to convey what he saw and what he knew."


Charlie Beckett calls him

quite simply the foreign correspondent’s correspondent. He was the benchmark for TV news reporting. Other journalists got bigger scoops, had more charisma or brought down governments. Meanwhile, Wheeler remained honest, engaging, human and intelligent at a consistently high standard for more than half a century.

Over at Comment is free,Martin Bell says he

set the standard to which all broadcast journalists of my generation aspired

. adding

He broke away from the "on the one hand this and on the other hand that" traditions of BBC reporting. If he felt that something was wrong, he found a way of saying so.

I understand that Radio 4 are broadcasting a tribute tomorrow morning at 11.00am