PBS anchor known as the ‘dean of moderators’
‘NEWSHOUR’ HOST
Jim Lehrer, a low-key television newsman who co-founded what is now called The PBS Newshour, which he anchored for 36 years and who was dubbed the “dean of moderators” for presiding over 12 presidential debates, died peacefully in his sleep Jan. 23 at his home in Washington. He was 85.
Lehrer began his career as a newspaper reporter in Texas before switching to broadcast journalism in the late 1960s, yet he always maintained the laconic, slightly rumpled manner of a city editor.
Besides questioning presidential candidates in debates from 1988 to 2012, Lehrer interviewed presidents and other world leaders directly, often asking pointed questions in a quiet, understated way.
At PBS in Washington he covered the Watergate hearings with Robert Macneil. In 1975 he became the co-anchor of The Macneil/lehrer Report which, since 2009, has been known as The PBS Newshour. He stepped down in 2011.
Among the tenets that governed his approach included believing everyone in his audience “is as smart and as caring and as good a person as I am,” and that “there is at least one other version to every story.”
He maintained a steady and calming presence during the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and later reported on the long wars in their wake.
James Charles Lehrer was born in Wichita, Kan., on May 19, 1934.
The family moved Texas, where Lehrer said his ambitions turned to journalism after reading the war correspondence of Ernie Pyle and other columnists known for their intimate, grunt’s-eyeview of combat. He graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1956.
After Marine Corps service in Okinawa, he worked at the Dallas Morning News. When his own publisher refused to print his series on a dubious civil defence organization, Lehrer quit and joined the rival Dallas Times Herald.
He next took a part-time consulting job at KERA-TV, the public television station in Dallas, where he was variously in charge of public affairs and host of an evening newscast. In 1972, was hired as the first public affairs coordinator for the fledgling Public Broadcasting Service in Washington.
Lehrer married Kate Staples in 1960. They had three children and six grandchildren.