Italian news anchor, Middle East expert Sandro Petrone dies
Italian television journalist and Middle East expert Sandro Petrone has died, aged 66. The TV and radio anchor passed away in Rome after finally losing a five-year battle against an aggressive form of lung cancer.
A special foreign correspondent for TG2 RAI, the Italian state broadcaster’s news channel, he covered major international stories including the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, the Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center.
He also reported on the train bombings at Atocha railway station in Madrid, the Oslo massacre of young people in 2011, the war in Kosovo, and the Arab Spring protests in Tunisia and Libya. In 1996 he covered the US presidential elections when Bill Clinton won his second mandate.
Petrone joined RAI in the early 1980s after having worked as an apprentice at the Giornale di Napoli daily newspaper in Naples, the city in southern Italy where he was born, a number of local papers in Puglia, and as a foreign desk reporter for Telemontecarlo. During his time in the news media, he developed a passion for the Middle East. “When I go to the Middle East I feel like I am where things happen, where the future is now and the past needs to be known and read in an earnest way,” he once told me as we traveled together to Lebanon to cover the state visit of an Italian foreign minister.
Fellow journalists admired him because he was always extremely keen to share his knowledge and explain what he knew without any professional jealousy. Asked about his political inclinations, he said: “We make news. It’s all that matters.”
The Italian public knew Petrone as a trusted prime time news anchor.
Even while ill, he taught foreign news reporting at Sapienza University’s faculty of communication sciences in Rome, IULM University in Milan, and at the RAI school of journalism in Perugia for its newly hired reporters.
Petrone’s students remember him for his kindness and humanity, and his strong desire to pass on his knowledge and experience of broadcasting journalism to them. His book, “The Language of News,” contains teaching tools and rules of television language which are considered as a milestone in the journalism academic community. He told his audience about the world. His news was immediate and complete, easy to understand, and delivered with elegance and tact.
FASTFACTS
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Sandro Petrone reported on some of the biggest international stories of recent decades.
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During his time in the news media, he developed a passion for the Middle East.
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He had been struggling against an aggressive form of lung cancer.