Groundbreaking dean of New York television journalism
The New York times
Gabe Pressman, the senior correspondent for WNBC-TV and the indefatigable dean of New York’s television reporters, who chased breaking news, interviewed countless celebrities and covered the hoopla of politics, protests and parades for more than six decades, died early Friday in New York. He was 93.
A spokesman for the station confirmed the death, at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Mr. Pressman was not a matinee-idol anchorman. To generations of mayors, governors and ordinary New Yorkers, he was Gabe: the short, rumpled, pushy guy from Channel 4 who seemed to be always on the scene, elbowing his way to the front and jabbing his microphone in the face of a witness or a big shot.
Over the course of a storied career, Mr. Pressman covered — and, at times, sparred with — every New York City mayor from Robert F. Wagner to Bill de Blasio. He kept at it long past the age when most people retired, a steady presence in a changing media landscape.
Mr. Pressman worked for several newspapers, including The New York WorldTelegram and Sun, and for a radio station before embarking on his television career in 1956 at WRCA, a forerunner of WNBC. Except for a stretch from 1972 to 1980 at its Channel 5 rival, known then as WNEW, he spent the rest of his working life with NBC’s New York flagship station. He was still working right up to his death: Earlier this year he covered the St. Patrick’s Day parade, as he had many times before.
Mr. Pressman was among the first local television reporters in New York City, and many believe he was the first. “All I know, I was alone out there,” Mr. Pressman said in an interview with TheNew York Times in 1998. “I was the only one holding the mike.”
In the early days of television news, when announcers often read wire stories on the air and reporting was largely left to the newspapers, Mr. Pressman did his own reporting, writing and reading his own scripts, and he was one of the first television journalists to take a camera crew into the streets for stand-up reports from the scenes of fires, murders and other spot news events.
With remarkable endurance, he covered many of New York’s major stories: the 1956 sinking of the Andrea Doria off Nantucket; the arrival of the Beatles in 1964; the 1969 Woodstock festival; regional power blackouts in 1965 and 1977; and a host of elections, protests, plane crashes, subway accidents, political scandals, transit strikes and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001.
He interviewed Fidel Castro, Golda Meir, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Casey Stengel, Robert F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Bella Abzug and every mayor and governor of New York in the last half of the 20th century, as well as every president from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.
Politicians and other newsmakers were his guests on WNBC’s “News Forum” on Sundays. And he made award-winning documentaries on homelessness, the mentally ill, racial conflicts and other subjects. He moderated political debates and town hall meetings and occasionally reported from Israel and other parts of the Middle East.
Gabriel Pressman was born in the Bronx on Feb. 14, 1924, the son of Benjamin and Lena Rifkin Pressman. His father, a dentist, bought him a hectograph, an early duplicating device, to produce a family newspaper, and he wrote pieces about his grandmother’s sponge cake and a cousin’s first tooth. He started a newspaper at Public School 35 in Bronx, and he was editor of the student newspaper and class president at Morris High School.
He attended New York University, majoring in history, and in the summers of 1941 and 1942 was a reporter for The Peekskill Evening Star. He enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and was a communications officer in the South Pacific. Back at NYU, he earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in 1946 before receiving a master’s degree in 1947 from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
After a stint as a reporter for The Newark Evening News in 1947, he won a fellowship to travel in Europe in 1948 and 1949 and wrote articles for the Overseas News Agency and The Times. In Budapest, he covered the 1949 show trial of Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, who was convicted of treason for opposing Stalinist repression in Hungary.
Over the decades, Mr. Pressman became the bestknown TV reporter in the city, a schmoozy journalist who colleagues said was earnestly passionate about news. They teased him about his trench coats and corduroy suits, and critics said his questions were sometimes amateurish — he would ask how it felt to be snared in a scandal or hurt in an accident.
But supporters defended his tenacity, and he won many honors, including 11 Emmys, a Peabody and a George Polk Award. As president of the New York Press Club, he pushed Mayor Rudy Giuliani for greater access to public records and to crime scenes, where the news media was typically penned up far from the action. The Giuliani administration, he said, had “some characteristics of a police state.”
Colleagues said he tried to rise above the limits of his medium. While television newscasts usually emphasized celebrities and disasters for their striking visuals, Mr. Pressman often covered news for its significance — housing violations or workers fighting for pensions — regardless of visual possibilities.
In 1982, when a homeless old woman froze to death in a cardboard box in Manhattan, he examined her life as well as her death. Tony Schwartz, in a review for The Times, called his reporting “a genuine piece of enterprise,” adding: “In contrast to the police-blotter approach that so often characterizes local television news, Mr. Pressman tried to explore a more basic question about a death: Why did it happen?”