Robert MacNeil, creator and first anchor of PBS NewsHour
MacNeil first gained prominence for his coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings for the public broadcasting service
The broadcast became the “MacNeil-Lehrer Report” and then, in 1983, was expanded to an hour and renamed the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.”
It was MacNeil’s and Lehrer’s disenchantment with the style and content of rival news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC that led to the program’s creation.
“We don’t need to SELL the news,” MacNeil told the Chicago Tribune in 1983. “The networks hype the news to make it seem vital, important.
When MacNeil visited the show in October 2005 to commemorate its 30th anniversary, he reminisced about how their newscast started in the days before cable television.
Writing is much more personal. It is not collaborative in the way that television must be,” MacNeil told The Associated Press in 1995.
Another book on language that he co-wrote, “Do You Speak American?,” was adapted into a PBS documentary in 2005.
Six years before the 9/11 attacks, discussing sensationalism and frivolity in the news business, he had said
In 1963, MacNeil was transferred to NBC’s Washington bureau, where he reported on Civil Rights and the White House.
In 1965, MacNeil became the New York anchor of the first half-hour weekend network news broadcast, “The Scherer-MacNeil Report” on NBC