Sir Charles Wheeler, who reported from Washington, Berlin and other capitals during a long and distinguished broadcasting career, died Friday. He was 85.
Wheeler died at his London home of lung cancer, according to the British Broadcasting Corp.
Wheeler covered the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the flight of the Dalai Lama from Tibet in 1959 and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
He had continued working for BBC radio until recently, his devotion tempered by his despair at changes in the industry such as the 24-hour TV news channel that he described as the BBC’s “worst idea yet.”
Wheeler was born in Germany, where his father worked for a shipping company, and he experienced life under Nazi rule. He recalled taking bread to Jewish neighbors who were in hiding. He was educated in Britain.
He joined the BBC in 1946, after service with the Royal Marines in World War II, and was assigned to Berlin in 1950. He was appointed South Asia correspondent in 1958, based in New Delhi, where he married Dip Singh in 1962.
Unafraid to add opinions to his reporting, Wheeler caused consternation by saying on air that an incoming president of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, was “an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a government of mediocrities.”
He was posted to Berlin in 1962, to Washington in 1965 and back to Europe in 1973. He moved to the BBC documentary series “Panorama” in 1977, and worked with the “Newsnight” program from 1980 to 1995. He was knighted in 2001.
“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 eyewitness reportage,” said Mark Byford, head of BBC Journalism.
