Robert Batscha

The recent passing of Robert Batscha, President of the Museum of Television & Radio (MT&R), came as a shock not only to the entertainment industry but numbed many in the UN community and beyond as well. Why the United Nations?

The easiest way to explain is to describe a setting a few months ago in the dining room of the MT&R in New York. It was the occasion of the annual meeting of UN editors, held in June 2003, an event in its 39th year of bringing together wordsmiths and communication professionals from UN agencies around the world. The prospect of being hosted to lunch at the MT&R had us all intrigued.

We were not disappointed, for rather than feeding us some vacuous spin about shows or personalities, Mr. Batscha guided us through a journey in which television lay at the heart of human communication and contemporary culture. Sure enough, Mr. Batscha, who had been President of the MT&R since 1981, was proud of the vast collection of 120,000 programmes he had built up and thrilled that both regular and famous folk alike would drop by to check out old shows. But to him the Museum was far more than entertainment; it was a tribute to television and radio as an historical archive and a "moving" documentary of our times, and a medium that reflected and drove change.

When lunch ended, I presented Mr. Batscha with a video tape on television at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He smiled warmly, telling me he had worked at OECD back in the 1970s; I later learned he had worked with the OECD Development Centre in Paris from 1974 to 1977, notably on a project with USAID funding to see whether research information on development got through to policy makers and, if it did, whether the data made sense to them or not.

Communications was clearly Mr. Batscha's vocation, having lectured on it at Queens College in New York in the early seventies. Before joining the MT&R, he was President of the Population Resource Center, Inc. and served on the Board of Directors of New Yorkers for Children-a welfare advocacy organization. Mr. Batscha clearly saw his role at MT&R as being more in the service of humanity than show business, lifting television out of its box and casting it into the world of policy makers, inviting them to use it as a tool for education and outreach. He understood from experience that international organizations suffered from a communications gap that he was anxious to help them fill. He kept in close contact with the United Nations, and as recently as May he had arranged the screening of a video compilation by the MT&R on "Media and Armed Conflict" to a special session of the UN Committee on Information to commemorate World Press Freedom Day, which was also attended by a number of non-governmental organizations.

I discovered all of this only recently, but none of it is a surprise. In fact, every one of us who had lunch with him at the MT&R that day in June was touched by this extraordinary person. One word that was buried in the flurry of e-mails of sympathy and shock triggered by the news of his death described him well: he was a "humanitarian". Robert Batscha died of cancer on 4 July at age 58. He is survived by his son Eric and former wife Francine Sommer.