Draft:David Tereshchuk

David Tereshchuk (born October 10th, 1948) is a British-American broadcast journalist who has worked for both UK and US television and radio in various roles of reporter, producer, documentarian, show-host and anchor. He has also contributed articles for print outlets on both sides of the Atlantic from The New York Times to The Guardian and others.

Since 2006 he has presented a weekly press review, The Media Beat, for the NPR station WHDD (Robin Hood Radio). A web version of The Media Beat has appeared online since 2004.

Early Life & Education
Tereshchuk was born in Nelson, UK and initially grew up in the Scottish Borderland. He was the son of Hilda Brown (later Hilda Tereshchuk), born when she was sixteen, and grandson to Janet Brown, who mainly raised him during his first 8 years. His maternal great-grandfather was John Dalrymple of Powfoot, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, a fisherman and farm laborer. His father and patrilineal ancestors are unknown.

He spent much of his teens in the Manchester area of northern England. His mother married Michael Tereshchuk in 1956, and David took Tereshchuk as a new surname. He had a sister, Julie Tereshchuk, eight years younger than him.

Tereshchuk attended Longtown Primary School in Cumbria and later North Manchester Grammar School (since closed). In 1966 he attended college as a member of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He read English Language and Literature, graduating with a B.A. degree in 1969, later to become M.A.

Beginnings in London Television (1969-1990)
While at Oxford Tereshchuk worked on the student body newspaper, Cherwell, becoming its editor in 1968. After graduating in 1969 he became a current affairs researcher for Thames TV, then part of the ITV network. In 1973 he began on-air reporting, appearing regularly on the early evening London show Today.

In 1975 he moved to London Weekend Television, to help launch The London Programme, a weekly investigative broadcast about the capital, on which he was a reporter and co-host. In 1977 he became a producer and co-host on the same company’s national and international Sunday morning show Weekend World. He was later overall Editor of Credo, ITV’s weekly report on religious and ethical matters, and also made documentary series such as Facing Death (about end-of-life issues), The Do-Gooders (about social work), and others.

Tereshchuk left British commercial television in 1983 to run the output of a non-profit, the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT), an alliance of international aid agencies including Oxfam, War on Want, Christian Aid and others. IBT’s mission was to educate rich world audiences about realities of life in the poor world. Production teams led by Tereshchuk made TV documentary series such as Common Ground, Utopia Limited and others. Study groups established throughout the UK employed the TV programs as study tools, along with IBT’s accompanying educational publications.

Tereshchuk himself produced, wrote and narrated a 1986 coproduction between IBT and Thames TV for the ITV network entitled Spear of the Nation, a TV history of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, and their struggle to overcome racist white rule in South Africa.

United States Television (1991-Present)
After emigrating to New York in 1991, Tereshchuk first taught broadcast news and documentary-making at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Over the next three decades he worked variously for ABC News, CBS News, CNN and as a media adviser to the United Nations, under the Secretary-Generalship of Kofi Annan.

Among his documentaries were Rosewood Massacre: The Untold Story (1996, ABC), Derry: A City of War and Peace (1997, CBS), South Africa’s First Free Elections (1994, for the United Nations).

In total he spent twelve years with the UN and reported on multiple countries including Congo, Niger, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Belize, Panama, Cyprus, Israel and Lebanon.

In 2012 he moved to PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service) first as a producer then as a correspondent on the weekly national show Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly. In 2016 he began contributing as Special Correspondent to the PBS NewsHour Weekend, concentrating on issues of ethics and belief.

In Other Media
Throughout his career Tereshchuk has contributed to non-television media. He wrote articles for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, New Statesman, New Society, The Listener and Broadcast magazines. In 2004 he began a press criticism column in Tribune Newspapers’ daily paper amNewYork, which has continued online at The Media Beat. A radio version of the column has appeared weekly since 2006, broadcast by the Connecticut NPR station WHDD (‘Robin Hood Radio’), and is available as a podcast from WHDD’s On Demand platform and via major podcasting platforms.

Personal Life
Tereshchuk married Melissa Bellinelli in 1991. They lived together in Manhattan and on Long Island until her death in 2016. They had no children.

He became a US citizen in 2002. He now lives in Manhattan with the painter Schellie Archbold.

He addressed the unknown elements of his parentage, as well his worldwide reporting, in a memoir published by Envelope Books (London) entitled A Question of Paternity: My Life as an Unaffiliated Reporter (ISBN-13: 9781915023155).