Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the rise of Broadcast News

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If you watch a newscast today, listen to the radio or a podcast then you are benefiting from the work of Lowell Thomas. Lowell Thomas was more famous than any American journalist has ever been. Thomas - quite the swashbuckling adventurer -- took American audiences with him on the radio and in newsreels, establishing personality driven journalism and reporting from around the world. During the First World War, Thomas traveled to the Middle East and discovered T.E. Lawrence, making him the celebrity, Lawrence of Arabia. Thomas was the role model for intrepid foreign correspondents today. The man who helped invent this way of reporting and telling the news was the Indiana Jones of journalism: crashing planes, falling from horses, staring down rifles but always coming back with the story. His stories shaped American knowledge of the world and influenced foreign policy. Later he managed to slip into Tibet, where he interviewed the Dalai Lama just before the Chinese invaded. In due course his enterprising zeal led him to found Capital Cities, which eventually bought ABC before being sold itself to Disney for 17 Billion dollars . Lowell Thomas' journalism is the journalism today described- sometimes bitterly, sometimes reverently - as "mainstream journalism." He was the original deep voiced omnipotent journalistic narrator: the first "voice of god." But his journalism was not always traditional. This documentary will tell the story of its creation.