Bernie’s Time Machine: Remembering Bob Simon

A great journalist taken before his time.

“He was old-school. He was a throwback to another era — in my view, a better era.”

In February of 2015, I received the tragic news that my former CBS News colleague, Bob Simon, had died in car accident.

A Fox News producer set up a morning phone-call segment with me to talk to Martha MacCallum about Simon’s life. I think it was a decent tribute to a great journalist.

At the beginning of the exchange, you’ll hear me refer to a different journalist who’d recently been exposed for making things up. That was NBC News’s Brian Williams, who infamously got caught fabricating details of various stories he’d covered, including war coverage in Iraq several years earlier.

Anyway, Bob Simon was the real deal — a consummate professional who I wish more journalists emulated.