David Webster, who edited Panorama during the late Sixties and early Seventies, has died aged 72.
Webster was born into a Quaker family and went to school in Somerset. He registered as a conscientious objector after being called for National Service in 1949 and worked for a while as a hospital porter. He then got a job at the World Movement for World Government before a brief stint as an actor.
He joined the BBC as a news trainee in 1953 before becoming a production assistant on the BBC current affairs programme in 1959. He was promoted to editor in 1967. Webster worked on reports in Vietnam during his time as a producer and worked with Richard Dimbleby in Skopje after the earthquake. He became a director of public affairs for the BBC during the Seventies and a member of the corporation’s board of management.
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He became the BBC’s director, United States, the only person ever to hold the position, and was later appointed chairman of the Transatlantic Dialogue on Broad- casting and the Information Society.
He had been working for the BBC in New York at the Rockefeller Centre when he left the corporation in 1987. He stayed in America, join-ing the Washington-based Annenberg Institute.
Webster married Lucy Law in Princeton, New Jersey with whom he had two sons. He later married Elizabeth Drew, a New Yorker columnist.
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Webster died from heart failure in Washington on 6 August.
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