Paul Duke Dies At 78

Paul Duke, who for two decades was the moderator of PBS’ venerable “Washington Week in Review,” died Monday after a bout with leukemia. He was 78.

Duke took over the show in 1974, just four years after it became a panel-oriented discussion show, and hosted until he retired in 1994. He also worked for the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and NBC. The Post obit today explains, “he developed something akin to a cult following as he presided every Friday night over a thoughtful, good-humored discussion of the week’s news with four respected journalists.”

He tried hard to keep WWIR civil, saying “I’m a rather old-fashioned journalist in that I believe we lay it out but are not judgmental…. Now a lot of reporters are judgmental. I’m not sure this is a healthy trend.”

During a brief return to the show in 1999 before current host Gwen Ifill took over, he said, “Washington Week fans are the greatest in the world, which is why we’ve kept going for lo these three decades. No one made the case better than a woman from Fresno, California, who wrote in some years ago to say, `Thank goodness there’s something that works in the capital without people yelling at one another.’ And I can assure you, that’s the way it’ll stay under the new management.”

Duke was also a recipient in 1999 of the John Chancellor Prize for lifetime journalistic excellence from Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication.

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