Norman DePoe was a pioneering figure in Canadian television news reporting, one of the heroic figures of frontline journalism. He was among the first of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC-TV’s) high-profile television correspondents and helped establish the traditions of television journalism in Canada. In the 1960s, he was a national institution, his gruff voice heard in almost every major news report on CBC-TV, when the public broadcaster dominated Canadian television news.

DePoe began his broadcasting career with CBC Radio in 1948, moved to the fledgling television service in 1956, joined the CBC-TV parliamentary bureau in 1959. He was named chief Ottawa correspondent in 1960. He became the first television reporter admitted to the parliamentary press gallery and helped provide legitimacy to the handful of broadcasters (five in 1959) who attempts to gain admission to the gallery had been strenuously resisted by many newspaper writers. As media historian Allan Levine has put it in Scrum Wars: The Prime Ministers and the Media (1993), “DePoe was the first television journalist who could compete on an intellectual level with the other stars of the gallery.” He was well read and a skillful writer. Years after he had left the air in 1975, DePoe’s hard-edged reporting style continued to set the standard for broadcast journalists. Politicians were quicker than print reporters to identify DePoe as a key player in the gallery and to foresee the dominance of television news in politics.

DePoe’s physical features were assets on the screens of the 1960s but in a way that would make him ill suited to the glamorized television newsroom that came later. Raspy voiced and rumpled, wrinkled and weary, DePoe cut an oddly romantic figure in the Humphrey Bogart mold. He possessed a prodigious memory and a healthy disregard for those in power, whether they were in political offices, government bureaucracies, or the management suites of the CBC. DePoe was famously contemptuous of producers and was not above criticizing them on air. For him, political reporting was a solitary exercise and at times a splendid joust with those he covered. His contributions to national newscasts were much-envied models of economical incisiveness.

Even during his spell as the principal reporter on national affairs, DePoe was assigned to cover significant political stories in the United States and elsewhere in the world. An unabashed patriot, his comments about U.S. politics could be biting. The visibility afforded by foreign assignments only added to his reputation as an authoritative commentator on politics for the English-language television audience in Canada. For many Canadians in the late 1950s and 1960s, especially rural audiences served by few other national media, he was perhaps the most credible authority on political affairs in Ottawa and elsewhere. It is estimated that he gave some 5,000 television news reports, including coverage of 31 elections, several leadership conventions, and other major political events.

Although DePoe was widely revered, there was another side to his career. He led romanticized life in journalism, full of the kind of carousing bellicosity often stereotyped in American cinematic treatments of news work. According to a successor in the Ottawa post, he was visibly inebriated during a live stand-up on at least one occasion, and the memoirs of contemporaries are replete with candid anecdotes or unmistakable hints about his rough-edged lifestyle. With respect to gossip about his drinking, he once remarked that “90 percent of the stories are not just true.” He fell out of favor with assignment editors in the early 1970s, and in 1975 he returned to radio news, finally retiring in 1976.

At the time of his death in 1980, DePoe was remembered by Knowlton Nash, another of the CBC’s well-known correspondents and one-time head of CBC News, as “the most memorable reporter of our lifetime… the most enjoyable, most charismatic, most effective electronic reporter Canada has ever seen, with a colorful, irrepressible style.” DePoe was regarded with wary respect by political leaders for his standard of integrity, his toughness, and his incisive reporting.