Apparently, this is the week American journalism loses figures it cherishes dearly.
Bob Simon did work as a foreign correspondent, was one of the faces you may associate with “60 Minutes,” and his young face may have appeared on your television during what would become his award winning coverage of Vietnam. He died in a car accident on Wednesday at the age of 73. If his name escapes you, or you’re not familiar with his work, he’s worth a Google search or two. When a journalist dies their family is in the first circle of loss. And while their peers and colleagues feel it as well, the public keenly misses the faces, voices and words of people they grew to trust and turn to, often over the course of decades. For a jumping off point, CBS has a piece on Simon to get you started.
Then the world lost David Carr on Thursday night. Carr wasn’t a broadcast journalist like Simon, this is the guy you’d know from print. His column at the New York Times is (was?) one of those confluence columns where culture and government and a little bit else all came together. He collapsed at the age of 58 in The Times newsroom, and was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. If you’ve never read his stuff, this response he gave when asked to recommend a book about journalism has a Carr amount of intensity to it. Not a guy who wrote or said things in a lackluster manner.
They were talented men whose work was appreciated and followed with good reason. This weekend, look up some of their old footage, their old writing. For nostalgia and with respect, should you be familiar with them already, or with curiosity and new-found knowledge, if you’re not.
