Sir Charles Wheeler a personal tribute

My first memory of Charles Wheeler was during Watergate. While I was to young to fully understand what was going on, what made him stand out in my mind was that he just told it the way it is.

It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that I really noticed him again. What was amusing was that some BBC producer had decided to have an outside broadcast in the middle of a fireworks display. He made it clear that that was bloody stupid, and it made me realise that here was a journalist that just wanted to tell the story without all the bells and whistles, it was the facts that mattered not the fancy gimmicks that the media so loves. Moreover he had some powerful things to say.

That alerted me to be watchful of any stories he was covering. His reporting told the story in a concise and informative way. He did not speculate, he just gave the facts that he had been able to discover and frequently he did get to the heart of the story.

Then it was following the first Gulf War that came the story that sticks in my mind. Saddam was repressing the Kurdish people, again, and CW had gone looking for the people seeking refuge. The report that emerged was extremely powerful. It was so powerful that it forced the western allies to go to the UN and create the No Fly Zones in Iraq. There are few journalists whose work has impacted the world as profoundly as that.

With a career as long as his was, there were many events in history that he was a witness to. I for one will miss the humanitarian that brought a high quality of journalism to the BBC.

A link to the BBC Obituary where clips of some of his significant work can be seen