Prominent journalist Tom Gould, whose career spanned more than 50 years in the news industry including a stint as the Ottawa correspondent for The Vancouver Sun, has died at the age of 84.
Gould, who covered almost every major news story between the 1950s and the 1980s from the U.S. civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, was a multi-award-winning newspaper reporter, television correspondent, executive producer, and radio commentator.
He died Thursday morning of cancer at his home in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
Gould, born Thomas Simpson Clark Reid Gould on Oct. 29, 1931 in Edmonton, Alberta, started his career with the Victoria Times before moving to The Vancouver Sun where he became the youngest member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
Gould joined the CBC in the early 1960s, when he began to make an impact as a broadcast journalist, telling the most important stories of the day from almost every corner of the globe. Some of his most memorable reports came from South Vietnam, where he told stories from the front lines, and informed Canadians of what was happening day to day during the “first televised war.”
From 1972 to 1977, Gould — at one point the co-host of W5 — was vice-president of news, features, and information programs for CTV, where he built the organization into a major force in Canadian television journalism.
He conceived and supervised a wide range of news programming, including Canada AM, W5, Maclear, Window on the World, and The Human Journey. Under Gould’s leadership, programs produced by CTV won numerous awards.
During his career, Gould interviewed every Canadian prime minister from Louis St. Laurent to Brian Mulroney, as well as world leaders including Deng Xiaoping, Madame Nhu, Alexander Haig and Indira Gandhi.
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