Robert Hargreaves

Robert, who has died aged 77, was the eldest of four children, the family living in Sowerby Bridge until 1946. In later life, his brother Roger would become the enormously successful creator of the Mr Men characters.

Their father Alfred owned a laundry – Roger worked there for a time – and sent Robert to Eastbourne College in Sussex, which was to have a pronounced influence on the boy's career in journalism. For it was there that he learnt the "received" accent which was for a long time required of television journalists. Not that the schoolboy Robert could have known that that was where his career would take him.

In 1950 and aged 18, he became a reporter on the Halifax Courier but was soon called up for National Service. He went into the RAF, was commissioned as a pilot, and afterwards returned to the Courier, studying shorthand with Bernard Ingham, who was later to become Margaret Thatcher's press secretary.

He left in 1956 to join the Daily Telegraph, working in its Manchester office. His next step was to Reuters, the international news agency where he became foreign editor.

Crucially, he left print journalism in 1962 to join ITN, becoming Washington Correspondent a year later. As such, his became a familiar face in the nation's living rooms, but his greater impact within the operation was as foreign editor after the launch of News at Ten.

In that role he organised the complex transition from film to video tape and satellite.

This was the coming of a new age in broadcasting, and the highly-intelligent and eminently practical Hargreaves was at the heart of it, being a pioneer of the new technologies both in front of and behind the camera.

Not only did he present a relaxed and fluent persona for the TV camera, but he possessed first rate organisational skills – and was likeable, too.

In the late 1960s he managed the opening of ITN's Washington bureau – reporters having until then worked out of New York – and as resident Washington correspondent covered the 1969 moon landings, the Manson murder trial, and desegregation in the Deep South. He also visited China with President Richard Nixon.

In 1972 Robert Hargreaves developed multiple sclerosis, and then came down with Hodgkin's disease. His health was progressively destroyed, but he coped with every adversity with phlegmatic courage and extraordinary good cheer.

Forced to return to the UK, he left ITN in 1979 to join the staff of the short-lived Now! magazine. When it folded, he was in Egypt to interview President Anwar Sadat , and Sadat's assassination in 1981 meant he was one of the last reporters to have done so.

He became a regulator at the Independent Broadcasting Authority and its successor, the Independent Television Commission, earning the respect of broadcasters for his wise counsel. He also advised on the televising of Parliament.

He wrote two books: Superpower (1973), about the USA, and The First Freedom (2002), on the history of free speech.

Robert Hargreaves is survived by his second wife, Sue Bazalgette, and by the two sons of his first marriage to Olivia Ames-Lewis, which ended in divorce.