For nearly two hours at Ryerson University, he shared his views on today's news media, and in particular TV news, which he dismissed as "coarser, shallower, more trivial, more prurient, more inaccurate, more insensitive, with each passing year."

Buerk, 59, comes by his jaundiced eye honestly. He is a distinguished foreign correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries, including a four-year assignment in South Africa from which he was asked to leave by the apartheid government.

This side of the Atlantic, he is best known as the journalist who alerted the world to the Ethiopian famine 20 years ago.

More recently, he served as one of BBC's main anchors on its flagship evening program, The Ten O'Clock News. He stepped down in 2002 but he continues to report for BBC's radio and TV networks.

Now he's promoting his lively — and often haunting — autobiography, The Road Taken.

But mostly, he laments the state of journalism in an age of 24-hour news, increased competition and corporate control, which puts financial interest ahead of public interest.

"I am an old croak," he cautioned at the beginning of his talk. "Old croaks think everything was better in their day. Ever since their withered hands were prised from the controls, everything has gone tits up. We all turn into King Lear, railing uselessly into the gale of modernity. You are starting on your career and are full of hope and optimism. I am coming to the end of mine and am probably full of bullshit."

Buerk's speech was part of the Atkinson lecture series, sponsored by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation.

While the Star's founding publisher Joseph Atkinson might not have approved of Buerk's style, he certainly would have agreed with the substance of his speech on the trivialization of news, and especially foreign reporting, today.

Branding it "rooftop ventriloquism," he attacked news networks that don't dispatch reporters to where the action is, to bring back eyewitness accounts of what is going on.

"It is little wonder that stories are sometimes reported by men and women who may be in the right country but, because they spend their days and nights on some hotel roof with a camera and a satellite link, may have no more first hand knowledge about what is going on than you do," he said. "They call them `dish monkeys' in the trade; the women are called `dish bitches.'

"What worries me is when these essentially stagy devices become a substitute for the reporter's real job. To my mind, that is not waving her arms about in a studio or on a hotel roof, it is going out there with her cameraman — they're still mostly men — and seeing for herself, bringing back the pictorial evidence of what she has seen and telling us what it means from the basis of her direct experience.

"That is the way to get closest to the truth, and to produce the most authentic journalism."

But today's corporate media are not interested in serious and significant news, said Buerk. Instead, they're churning out "childish" news, dumbed down for numbed out audiences.

"A lot of thought seems to be going into making it thoughtless," he observed. "It seems to be getting both thick and thin."

The "essential paradox," he explained, is that, while readers and viewers are better educated than in the past, the media are lowering the IQ of their output.

"The new, wider definition of news embrace(s) the cult of celebrity with enthusiasm," he said. "The question (is) no longer does it matter but is this what people are talking about?"

In the end, he fears, we will be a woefully ignorant populace, unable to choose and check leaders.

"A flawed media, I suggest, leads to a flawed democracy," he warned. "Ill informed citizens cannot make proper judgments about their leaders' actions, about the actions that take place in their names, about the laws that govern them. The media matter."

Which is exactly what this old croak has been saying in this space for years.

But then you, faithful reader, get it, don't you?

© 2005 Toronto Star