BBC journalist Charles Wheeler dies

11:32pm Friday 4th July 2008

Sir Charles Wheeler, one of the BBC's longest-serving and most popular foreign correspondents, has died, the corporation announced. He was 85.

The BBC said Sir Charles died at his home on Friday morning from lung cancer.

Sir Charles was chief US correspondent from 1969 to 1973, when he was made Europe correspondent. In the 1950s, he worked as a correspondent in Germany and South Asia.

In the US, Sir Charles covered the assassination of Martin Luther King, Beatlemania, and Watergate. He also worked for Newsnight for 15 years and was a Panorama producer.

Sir Charles made his name while in Delhi, covering the Dalai Lama's flight from Tibet. The journalist, who was born a year after the BBC was founded, was critical of the cult of personality in TV news journalism.

BBC director general Mark Thompson described Sir Charles as "utterly irreplaceable".

He said: "To audiences and to his colleagues alike, Charles Wheeler was simply a legend. 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."

Deputy BBC Director General and Head of BBC Journalism Mark Byford said: "Charles was, in my view, the greatest broadcast journalist of his generation.

"Courageous, insightful and always curious, he had the truly outstanding gift for vivid, beautiful writing matched by a quite extraordinary skill for using pictures and sound to convey the power of his own eye witness reportage.

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