Sun Editor Rebekah Wade made headlines herself this week when she moved from the newsroom to the boardroom to become the Chief Executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

It has taken Ms Wade, 41, twenty years to rise from a researcher on the News of the World magazine to become a powerful media mover-and-shaker with close contacts in Westminster and Show Business.

It’s perhaps surprising that the queen of Britain’s red tops has a degree in French from La Sorbonne when you’d imagine that most tabloid editors would assume Ile De La Cite was a fancy pie and mash shop for East End barrow boys.

But there are many linguists on Up To Speed’s list of 75 well-known journalists.

It may seem obvious that if you hope to become a foreign correspondent an ability to speak the language will help. Thomson Reuters has traditionally recruited many of the country’s brightest language graduates to use those skills. The Oxford-educated BBC Diplomatic Correspondent Bridget Kendall must have found her fluent Russian handy when she worked as a Moscow Correspondent. However, if you look at other people on the BBC’s extensive list of high-profile foreign correspondents, you’ll also find that knowledge of the native tongue is regarded as less important than an ability to report from anywhere and to tell a story compellingly. Kate Adie’s degree in Scandinavian Studies from Newcastle has never limited the scope of her reporting to peaceful democracies fringing the Baltic.

Indeed, many language graduates are not ostensibly using their skills at all in their day-to-day jobs. Before they read the news, Fiona Bruce read French and Italian at Oxford and Huw Edwards read French at Cardiff. Their boss at BBC News, Kevin Bakhurst read French and German at Cambridge. BBC presenters Sophie Raworth and Joanna Gosling read Modern Languages at Manchester and Birmingham respectively, Dani Sinha read French and Latin at Bristol.

Channel 4 News’ Brigid Nzekwu took a language degree in London.  

In the field, two of the BBC’s front-line reporters will have found their knowledge of Arabic and Islam invaluable. The former Baghdad Correspondent Caroline Hawley read Arabic at Oxford, while the Security Correspondent Frank Gardner studied it at Exeter.

And while they may not have found it possible to apply their linguistic skills in the modern world, Boris Johnson and Radio 4 Presenter Martha Kearney have clearly put to good use the four years they spent studying Classics on the Greats course at Oxford.

So, languages can be useful in journalism. Quod erat demonstrandum. Tomorrow, we look at journalists who’ve studied zoology, physics and journalism.

Oxford comes out top in Up To Speed’s look at the educational backgrounds of 75 leading journalists and one course at the university stands out.

No fewer than eleven people on our list have a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and ten of them are BBC names. You’ll have seen them on the Six O’Clock News, the Ten O’clock News, BBC4, Newsnight, Question Time and Dragon’s Den.

They are: Zeinab Badawi, Ben Brown, Michael Crick, Evan Davis, David Dimbleby, Guto Harri, Robert Peston, James Robbins, Nick Robinson and Peter Sissons. And over on Channel 4 News you can also find another PPE graduate, Krishnan Guru-Murthy.

In a year that has been dominated by the credit crunch and revelations about MPs’ expenses, it is not difficult to see why editors are keen to snap up people who understand finance and who took the same degree as David Cameron and many of Gordon Brown’s ministers and former ministers.

But once again, many of the people on the list found time at Oxford to make a mark for themselves in other ways. David Dimbleby edited the university magazine Isis, while Peter Sissons, Evan Davis and Michael Crick edited the student newspaper Cherwell. It was in this capacity that Crick gave Nick Robinson a Pushy Fresher Award. Crick was clearly no push-over himself as he later became President of the Oxford Union.

Channel 4 News Presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy might also have been a contender for a Pushy Fresher Award when he arrived at Oxford as he’d already made a name for himself during his Gap Year. Guru-Murthy had presented Open To Question, part of the Def II strand of Youth Television pioneered by Jane Street-Porter, and went straight into a presenter’s job on Newsround when he graduated.

But a degree in PPE and a father who presented the news on ITN didn’t do the trick for the BBC’s Ben Brown. He was turned down for a traineeship with both ITN and the BBC and claims his first break with Radio Clyde in Glasgow was down to a mix-up with a preferred candidate, also called Ben Brown.

The PPE degree at Oxford does not have an absolute newsroom monopoly. ITV News presenter Katie Derham read Economics at Cambridge. Channel 4 News Presenter and reporter Carl Dinnen was also at Cambridge, where he read Social and Political Science. The BBC’s Justin Webb read Economics at the London School of Economics and Will Lewis, Editor of the Daily Telegraph, read Politics and Economics at Bristol. Former Channel 4 News Ecomonics Correspondent Liam Halligan read Economics at Warwick before taking an MA at Oxford while Sky’s Jeff Randall took an Economics degree at Nottingham. George Alagiah read Politics at Durham and his fellow BBC presenter Jane Hill took the same subject in London.

Although Philosophy may seem like the poor relation when it comes to practical knowledge in journalism, it may have helped Oxford graduate Will Self and NME editor Conor McNicholas, who studied in Manchester, to challenge their readers’ perceptions of the world around them.

With the recession showing few signs of abating and a general election in the offing, there’s little chance that PPE is going to lose its attraction for editors in the near future.