I was saddened to read that one of the truly distinguished foreign correspondents for CBS News, Tom Fenton, had passed. He was 94.
I had always admired his reporting and distinctive, elegant style that graced his television news pieces. I was privileged to become friends with Tom and his equally elegant wife Simone. They both attended many events at our Frontline Club in London. His insights and probing questions elevated the quality of our discussions. I valued enormously his discerning critiques of television news programs both in Britain and in the United States. He told me that he and Simone recorded and watched daily the newscasts on CBS, NBC, and ABC. He didn’t shy away from speaking his mind about the failings of the American networks, including CBS News executives, in embracing tabloid news values. He was especially scathing about their failure to provide in-depth international news coverage in his excellent book ” Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All.” He wrote: “Stories that seek to explain the relevance of incremental developments in far-off countries rarely see the light of day. They get spiked by evening news producers preoccupied by ratings, because most people in our business are convinced -wrongly, I believe that the public couldn’t care less about foreign news.
What Tom Fenton wrote in 2005 is more glaringly obvious now with the nightly newscasts’ distorted, bordering on obsessive, coverage of severe weather, crime stories, airplane scares, and the TikTok viral video of the day.
If ever a male foreign correspondent of his era of television news looked as if he were from central casting- trench coat and all- it was Tom Fenton. But he was the real deal and a wonderful gentleman.