National Post (National Edition)
Newsman combined ‘passion, compassion’
JOE SCHLESINGER 1928-2019
TORONTO• Longtime CBC foreign correspondent Joe Schlesinger, who spent decades covering war zones and global events that shaped history, has died after a lengthy illness.
A spokesman for the public broadcaster says Schlesinger died peacefully in his home at age 90 with his wife, Judith Levene, by his side.
Retired CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge said even through his health struggles Schlesinger maintained his journalistic fire, criticizing the coverage of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
“It was a difficult time but at the same time he didn’t lose his spirit,” said Mansbridge. “He was the kind you always looked up to.”
Schlesinger was born in Vienna in 1928 and raised in former Czechoslovakia. He and his younger brother fled to England in 1939, after Hitler occupied the country. When he returned home in 1945, Schlesinger discovered that his parents had been killed in the Holocaust.
Mansbridge said Schlesinger ’s own experience drove him to write about the Syrian refugee crisis, even after his retirement from the CBC.
“He had a passion for journalism, strongly believed as we all do that it’s one of the important pillars of democracy,” he said. “But he also had a compassion for those he covered. And he showed it right to the end.”
Schlesinger began his journalism career in 1948 with The Associated Press in Prague. When the Communists began arresting journalists in Czechoslovakia two years later, he moved to Canada, attending the University of British Columbia and working at the student newspaper. The love of a good story, and the thrill of the hunt took him to London and then to Paris, where he eventually began working at the International Herald Tribune.
He joined the CBC in 1966, becoming executive producer of The National, but was drawn back to reporting in Hong Kong, Paris, Washington and Berlin.
Ian Hanomansing, coanchor of The National, remembers being intimidated by Schlesinger’s distinguished resume when they started working together on CBC News Network’s Foreign Assignment in the late 1990s, but said he was soon disarmed by his co-host’s gentle demeanour.
“He was a window not just into the world he saw, but also into the world of the foreign correspondent that I don’t know quite exists in Canada now the way it was then.”