FAREWELL ED BRADLEY

From the Houston Chronicle:

60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley dies at 65

Ed Bradley, an Emmy-winning contributor to 60 Minutes for more than 25 years, died Thursday of leukemia at age 65.

People close to the private Bradley knew he was ill, but news of his passing still shocked colleagues.

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl told Fox News that Bradley's leukemia had been in remission until several days ago, when it "came back with a vengeance."

And

Before joining TV's pre-eminent news magazine, Bradley was CBS's first black White House correspondent.

"I looked up to him for many years before I got into the business," said KHOU (Channel 11) anchor Len Cannon. "He just had a way with telling a story. He wasn't a combative person, but he got answers to his questions; he was respectfully confrontational. Anytime you see an African-American in the position of Ed Bradley, there's great pride and admiration and respect there."

KPRC (Channel 2) anchor Jerome Gray said Bradley "was one of those people I looked up to and truly admired. From watching his reporting in Vietnam to his incredible interviews on 60 Minutes, that man was like an idol to a whole generation of journalists. I just can't believe he's not here anymore."

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You may or may not have noticed a while back that I didn't make a farewell post for longtime ABC evening news anchor Peter Jennings when he died. It's not that it wasn't sad, or that Jennings wasn't professional, or anything along those lines: it's that I don't really like TV journalists that much. One could argue persuasively that what passes for news these days on television barely even qualifies as journalism, and one would easily win an argument hands down asserting that broadcast journalists are a bunch of self-important pompous assholes--Bradley's CBS colleagues Dan Rather and Mike Wallace come to mind here rather strongly.

Anyway, the point here is that, in a forest of wanna be journalist TV assholes, Ed Bradley stood out as a real reporter, with humility, in the old school Murrow fashion. I don't really remember when I started paying attention to him. I know I started watching 60 Minutes when I was pretty young, ten or eleven, during the late 70s, so I'm sure I caught Bradley's run on the show from the very beginning. I know for sure that I was into him around the time he got his ear pierced at some point in the 90s; I read some report about it and I remember thinking, "Oh yeah, that guy, I've always loved him--how cool that he got an earring." A while later I started listening to the great radio show he hosted, Jazz at Lincoln Center. I was like, "He's into jazz? Fucking cool!!!" I've been a major Ed Bradley fan ever since.

His passing is truly a drag for me. In addition to his great news stories and jazz radio work, Bradley simply had a great persona. Quick to laugh, but dead serious when the situation called for it, a snazzy dresser, articulate but not stuffy, elegant in movement and stance, posessed of a remarkable voice, hip but not too much so, Bradley was, to me, something of a role model, not as a journalist, but as an American man. For my money, he was as cool as Miles Davis or Frank Sinatra, perhaps even more so because he was all over the place and right in the middle of Earth shaking events.



Farewell Ed Bradley.

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