Dead Celebrity Alert

Tony Snow, a former White House spokesman and veteran radio and television journalist, has died following a long battle with colon cancer, his former employers said Saturday. He was 53.

Snow was a commentator on the Fox News network when he was named President George W. Bush’s chief spokesman in May 2006. He stepped down in September after 16 months on the job. …

Snow worked as a speechwriter under Bush’s father, president George H.W. Bush, in the early 1990s. …

Snow joined Fox in 1996 as the first anchor of “Fox News Sunday,” a weekend morning talk show, and hosted “Weekend Live” and a radio program, “The Tony Snow Show,” before leaving for the White House. … Read full obituary

October 2, 1925 - July 1, 2008

Clay Felker was a pioneering editor whose New York magazine became a template for what became known as the “new journalism” adopted by urban weeklies in America. A sometimes bitchy but always stylish glossy that included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Gloria Steinem in its stable of writers, New York reported on the mixture of ambition, money, culture and fashion that obsessed the city then and now. …

New York had begun life as a supplement to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Felker and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced it as a separate publication in 1968 several years after the closure of its parent paper. …

In 1984 he married his third wife, the journalist Gail Sheehy, author of Passages and other well-received books. … Read full obituary

March 26, 1923 - July 4, 2008

The doyen of BBC foreign correspondents, Charles Wheeler earned a permanent niche in television history through his coverage of the Watergate scandal during his years as the corporation’s chief correspondent in the United States. Often ahead of the American press corps, he exploited the contacts he had built up during seven years in Washington to provide the fullest and most comprehensive reporting available in the British media — and more than matching in quality, though not in quantity, that of the American networks. …

He enjoyed a particular triumph at the 1972 Republican convention which renominated President Nixon, getting hold of the convention chairman’s teleprompter script which covered everything down to the meticulously timed pauses for “spontaneous applause” — and resisting all the efforts from the party high command to make him surrender it. It was just the kind of coup that Wheeler enjoyed. It was not at all that he disliked politicians — merely that he thought it was a journalist’s duty to expose humbug whenever it surfaced.

That made him particularly qualified to cover the Watergate scandal. … Read full obituary

Tim Russert, the host of “Meet the Press,” and NBC’s Washington bureau chief, has died. He was 58.

Mr. Russert was a towering figure in American journalism and moderated several debates during the recent presidential primary season.

Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, came on the air at 3:39 p.m. that Mr. Russert had collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work. He had just returned from Italy with his family. … Read initial story

Full obit to come.

September ?, 1939 - May 31, 2008

Glamorous and scandal-prone newspaper columnist who confessed to being the long-term mistress of the Irish Prime Minister

Terry Keane, the mistress of the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, created a sensation in May 1999 when she went on Irish television giving details of their affair, which had gone on for 27 years and had long been the subject of speculation, much of it fanned by herself. She followed on with extracts from a forthcoming book in The Sunday Times containing rather intimate photographs for which she received £50,000. The book never appeared. … Read full obituary

Read full obituary

NEW YORK (AP) — William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said. …

“For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television,” fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. “He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement.” …

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955… Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft. … Read full obituary

KEYSTONE, Colo. — Former ABC News correspondent John McWethy died Wednesday after a skiing accident at Keystone Ski Resort. …

According to the Summit County coroner’s office, McWethy died after missing a turn on an intermediate slope and hit a tree chest-first.

McWethy was a correspondent for ABC News from 1979-2003, primarily working as the network’s National Security Correspondent. … Read full obituary

LONDON — Hugh Massingberd, who developed the obituary into entertaining and irreverent brilliance at The Daily Telegraph, died Tuesday.

Massingberd, 60, had been diagnosed with cancer in 2004.

His term as obituaries editor, from 1986 to 1994, was “just a lucky time … a time when so many legends of the century were dying,” Massingberd said in 1996. …

Massingberd’s creed was that an obituary should give pleasure to relatives and friends, as well as the general reader. … Read full obituary

Thomas Morgan III, 56, a former reporter and editor at the New York Times, died Monday of AIDS complications.

According to an obituary in the Times, Morgan’s accomplishments were great: He served as the first openly gay president of the National Association of Black Journalists from 1989 to 1991, received a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1990, and was inducted into the hall of fame of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in 2005. … Read full obituary

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bay Area news community is mourning the loss of beloved veteran television and radio news anchor Pete Wilson.

Wilson, 62, died Friday night of a massive heart attack suffered during hip replacement surgery at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, according to KGO-TV, ABC-7.

Wilson co-anchored the 6 p.m. weekday KGO-TV, ABC-7 newscast since 2002 and hosted a daily afternoon talk show for KGO-AM 810 NewsTalk since 2000. Before that, Wilson anchored newscasts for KRON-4 in San Francisco beginning in 1990 and KXTL-TV in Sacramento. …

“Pete was one of the most valued and respected news professionals in the Bay Area and the country,” said ABC-7 President and General Manager Valari Staab said today. “For more than 30 years, he was welcomed into the homes of thousands of local viewers reporting on every major news event that touched their lives. This is a deep loss both personally and professional for all of his friends and colleagues at Channel 7 and for me.” …

Wilson received a number of broadcast journalism honors, including the Peabody Award, several Emmy Awards and many local and national awards. … Read full obituary

June 16, 2007 — Claudia Cohen, a high-profile gossip reporter for television and newspapers who was a frequent subject of the gossip columns herself, partly because of her marriage to, and remunerative divorce from, the billionaire businessman Ronald O. Perelman, died yesterday in Manhattan. She was 56 and had homes in Manhattan and Easthampton, N.Y.

The cause was ovarian cancer, said Chris Taylor, a spokeswoman for Mr. Perelman.

Ms. Cohen was known for her aggressive pursuit of celebrity news and her ability to handicap the Academy Awards. She first came to public attention in the late 1970s as a reporter and editor for Page Six, the well-thumbed column of The New York Post. In the early ’80s, she wrote a gossip column, “I, Claudia,” for The Daily News of New York.

In recent years, Ms. Cohen was a regular correspondent, covering entertainment, for the syndicated talk show “Live With Regis and Kelly” and its predecessor, “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.” She was previously an entertainment reporter for “The Morning Show” on WABC-TV. … Read full obituary

Kate Webb, a courageous foreign correspondent who forged a path for other female journalists in a four-decade career spent largely in turbulent Asian outposts, including a harrowing period in Cambodia during the Vietnam War when she was captured and presumed dead, has died. She was 64.

The pioneering reporter had bowel cancer and died Sunday in Sydney, Australia, her brother, Jeremy Webb, told the Associated Press.

Ms. Webb was the first woman to head a bureau in a war zone for United Press International…

Assigned to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, Webb was one of six journalists captured by North Vietnamese troops while covering a battle in April 1971. Subjected to forced marches with little to eat or drink, malarial fevers and repeated interrogations, she emerged from the jungle after 24 days, astonishing colleagues who had already published her obituary. … Read full obituary

David Rosenzweig, a former Los Angeles Times editor whose journalism career included coverage of the Vietnam War, the Hillside Strangler case and the Symbionese Liberation Army, has died. He was 67. Rosenzweig, who had cancer, died of pneumonia Wednesday at his home in Santa Monica, said his wife, Lael Rubin. …

Rosenzweig made news himself in Los Angeles during the McMartin Pre-School molestation case in the 1980s when he acknowledged that he had become romantically involved with Rubin, who was lead prosecutor. Rosenzweig recused himself from covering the case. … Read full obituary

Former racing writer and columnist Bill Casey has died in Sydney after a long illness. He was 72. …

Casey worked as a racing journalist on the Melbourne Argus and The Age before moving to Sydney to join the afternoon daily The Sun as racing editor.

He was later appointed sports editor and then assistant editor (news and sport), a position he held until the newspaper closed in 1988.

His non-racing assignments included covering Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984. … Read full obituary