Showing great taste, viewers didn’t bother sticking around for the I’m A Celebrity elimination last night.
Amid all the tributes to CNN interview giant Larry King, who died late last week, another giant of US journalism retired on Friday. Tom Brokaw was the host of NBC News for 22 years and a contemporary of Dan Rather — now an independent journalist/commentator and Brokaw’s former peer at CBS — and the late Peter Jennings at ABC.
All three started in the mid-’60s and trace their journalism back to the likes of Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley at CBS, and before them, Edward R Murrow at CBS. Modern TV journalism and news hosting techniques are to be found in the skills of these major figures, even today. Brokaw is 80 and retired after 55 years at NBC. Larry King died at the age of 87 having retired in 2010. No one has replaced him in the eyes of viewers as a must watch for an interview with a major figure.
Those on the cable channels today such as CNN, MSNBC, BBC World, Sky News Australia and especially Fox News might dream of being Larry King-like but they are fooling themselves. They are, in most cases, pretenders or worse.
