Where have all the journalists gone?

Perhaps it is a sign of the decline of formal media and its influence that we don’t seem to grow the great reporters any more.                                                                            

In my book, the greatest of them all were Walter Cronkite, Edward R Murrow and Richard Dimbleby. Who can forget Cronkite’s sign-off ‘And that’s the way it is!’ or Murrow’s intro ‘This......is London’. It sure was; you could hear the bombs falling when he did his famous broadcast in the middle of the Blitz. When we think of the influence of the media today, what could compare with those broadcasts which undoubtedly encouraged the US to enter the war, when Joe Kennedy, the old bootlegger who was a Nazi sympathiser and Ambassador to UK, was telling FDR that the Brits were done-for? And the destruction of Joe McCarthy? That’s influence!

Although Dimbleby later became famous for commentating on state events, he was the BBC’s first war correspondent. Like Murrow and Cronkite he reported from the thick of it. He went all through the war, from the BEF to the very end. I well remember his unforgettable broadcast from Belsen on the day it was liberated.

All three were very brave men; alas, Murrow and Dimbleby both died in their 50’s.

Not forgetting, of course, the late, great Alistair Cooke, whose ‘Letter from America’ was compulsory listening for most of my life. He created a new broadcasting art-form. He met just about every great person pf the 20^th century from FDR to Mohammed Ali.

The last of the breed seem to have been the likes of Sandy Gall, John Simpson, Martin Bell and the indomitable Kate Adie. I still have this mental picture of Simpson being the first to enter Kabul dressed in a burqa – some big lady! And of him being struck by bomb fragments that killed his interpreter who was standing next to him.

Sure there are many brave reporters following recent conflicts but no great broadcasters in the previous mould.

By-the-by, the Economist this week-end is covering the decline of the mass media as we know it due to the rise of social networking, the internet, and the rest. Seems like they have been reading our blogs!