In Turkey, Jan. 17, 2013, will be remembered as “The Death of the Journalist.” Nobody will ask which journalist because the name that most deserved the label, ‘’The Journalist,” was without doubt Mehmet Ali Birand. On that day he died. It was a sudden death.
He was a journalist with international stature who had signed his name to so many successes in journalism and, more importantly, he was the pioneer and unrivaled master of television journalism. In recent years, he had added to his long list of qualifications being the anchorman of an important TV channel. Although he had been afflicted with pancreatic cancer two years ago, he never abandoned the TV screen apart from his days of surgery and annual leave. Even in the evenings of his chemotherapy sessions he appeared in front of his millions of viewers. His death did not come as the inevitable end of his cancer. One night he said to his viewers that “We will meet tomorrow night" and went to the hospital for a simple surgery. His heart just stopped totally unexpectedly after a successful surgery. Probably his heart had mutinied against sustaining the formidable energy that had kept him going for over 50 years.