Photo from Camille Menassa's Facebook account
Journalist Camille Menassa, former administrative director of L'Orient-Le Jour from the early 1970s to the 2000s, died in Lebanon less than three weeks after turning 88, his family announced on Wednesday.
Carried away by illness, he was one of the pioneers of Lebanese television and a correspondent for many foreign media.
Menassa began his career as a journalist in 1957 at L'Orient, 14 years before it merged with Le Jour.
Before becoming editor-in-chief and program director, between 1960 and 1971, for channels 7 and 9 of Télé-Liban, the first television channel in the Arab world, Menassa had also worked as a film translator for Lebanese TV.
Among other things, he announced to the Lebanese public the deaths of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 and Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, as well as the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969.
This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.