Robert MacNeil, creator and first anchor of PBS ‘NewsHour’ nightly newscast, dies at 93
NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Robert MacNeil, who created the even-handed, no-frills PBS newscast “The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” within the Seventies and co-anchored the present for together with his late associate, Jim Lehrer, for 20 years, died on Friday. He was 93.
MacNeil died of pure causes at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, in keeping with his daughter, Alison MacNeil.
MacNeil first gained prominence for his protection of the Senate Watergate hearings for the general public broadcasting service and started his half-hour “Robert MacNeil Report” on PBS in 1975 together with his pal Lehrer as Washington correspondent.
The printed turned the “MacNeil-Lehrer Report” after which, in 1983, was expanded to an hour and renamed the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.” The nation’s first one-hour night information broadcast, and recipient of a number of Emmy and Peabody awards, it stays on the air in the present day with Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz as anchors.
It was MacNeil’s and Lehrer’s disenchantment with the type and content material of rival information applications on ABC, CBS and NBC that led to this system’s creation.
“We don’t have to SELL the information,” MacNeil advised the Chicago Tribune in 1983. “The networks hype the information to make it appear important, necessary. What’s lacking (in 22 minutes) is context, typically stability, and a consideration of questions which might be raised by sure occasions.”
MacNeil left anchoring duties at “NewsHour” after 20 years in 1995 to put in writing full time. Lehrer took over the newscast alone, and he remained there till 2009. Lehrer died in 2020.
When MacNeil visited the present in October 2005 to commemorate its thirtieth anniversary, he reminisced about how their newscast began within the days earlier than cable tv.
“It was a approach to do one thing that appeared to be wanted journalistically and but was totally different from what the industrial community information (applications) had been doing,” he stated.
MacNeil wrote a number of books, together with two memoirs “The Proper Place on the Proper Time” and one of the best vendor “Wordstruck,” and the novels “Burden of Need” and “The Voyage.”
“Writing is rather more private. It’s not collaborative in the way in which that tv should be,” MacNeil advised The Related Press in 1995. “However if you’re sitting down writing a novel, it’s simply you: Right here’s what I feel, right here’s what I wish to do. And it’s me.”
MacNeil additionally created the Emmy-winning 1986 collection “The Story of English,” with the MacNeil-Lehrer manufacturing firm, and was co-author of the companion e-book of the identical identify.
One other e-book on language that he co-wrote, “Do You Converse American?,” was tailored right into a PBS documentary in 2005.
In 2007, he served as host of “America at a Crossroads,” a six-night PBS bundle exploring challenges confronting the US in a post-9/11 world.
Six years earlier than the 9/11 assaults, discussing sensationalism and frivolity within the information enterprise, he had stated: “If one thing actually severe did occur to the nation — a inventory market crash like 1929, … the equal of a Pearl Harbor — wouldn’t the information get very severe once more? Wouldn’t individuals run from `Arduous Copy’ and titillation?”
“After all you’ll. You’d must know what was happening.”
That was the case — for some time.
Born in Montreal in 1931, MacNeil was raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and graduated from Carleton College in Ottawa in 1955 earlier than transferring to London the place he started his journalism profession with Reuters. He switched to TV information in 1960, taking a job with NBC in London as a international correspondent.
In 1963, MacNeil was transferred to NBC’s Washington bureau, the place he reported on Civil Rights and the White Home. He coated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and spent most of 1964 following the presidential marketing campaign between Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, and Republican Barry Goldwater.
In 1965, MacNeil turned the New York anchor of the primary half-hour weekend community information broadcast, “The Scherer-MacNeil Report” on NBC. Whereas in New York, he additionally anchored native newscasts and a number of other NBC information documentaries, together with “The Huge Ear” and “The Proper to Bear Arms.”
MacNeil returned to London in 1967 as a reporter for the British Broadcasting Corp.’s “Panorama” collection. Whereas with the BBC, be coated such U.S. tales because the conflict between anti-war demonstrators and the Chicago police on the 1968 Democratic Conference, and the funerals of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Sen. Robert Kennedy and President Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1971, MacNeil left the BBC to grow to be a senior correspondent for PBS, the place he teamed up with Lehrer to co-anchor public tv’s Emmy-winning protection of the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973.
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Related Press media author David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.
