ASSOCIATED PRESS
Paul Duke, whose storytelling skills and evenhandedness set the tone for the venerable public TV show “Washington Week in Review,” died of leukemia Monday at his home, his former employer WETA-TV said yesterday. He was 78.
He was already a political news veteran — having worked for AP, the Wall Street Journal and NBC — in 1974 when he began his two-decade stint as the show’s moderator. Now called “Washington Week,” the Friday night program featuring reporters discussing the week’s news is the Public Broadcasting Service’s longest-running news program.
Mr. Duke dubbed it “the granddaddy of television’s informal, conversational news discussion programs.”
On WETA’s Web site, current “Washington Week” host Gwen Ifill wrote that her predecessor “will always be the unseen panelist at the table.”
Mr. Duke was “a natural-born storyteller,” said Dalton Delan, executive producer of the show. “He was an expert at knowing that a fact is of no use if it has not been communicated well.”
A native of Richmond, Mr. Duke delivered newscasts for a local radio station as a teenager. After graduating from the University of Richmond in 1947, he covered sports for the AP. But he soon was reporting on the state’s brewing civil rights issues, which took him to the news agency’s Washington bureau in 1957.
For the Wall Street Journal, he covered Capitol Hill from 1959 to 1963 and during the 1960 presidential campaign. After a decade of congressional reporting for NBC, Mr. Duke joined public TV in 1974. During his time at “Washington Week,” the show earned an Emmy and saw its average audience increase from 1.5 million to 4.6 million.
Mr. Duke briefly returned as the show’s moderator in 1999. One of his final public TV projects was a 2000 documentary called “The Great Campaign of 1960.”
Divorced once, Mr. Duke is survived by his wife of 20 years, Janet Wachter Duke, a son from his first marriage, a stepdaughter and a stepgrandchild.
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