Robert MacNeil, who founded ‘PBS NewsHour,’ dies at 93
Robert MacNeil, a Canadian-born broadcast journalist who built what is now “PBS NewsHour” and served for two decades as its urbane, evenhanded co-anchor, died Friday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.
His daughter Alison MacNeil confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.
MacNeil, known as Robin, and Jim Lehrer, a former Texas newspaperman, formed one of television journalism’s most successful and enduring partnerships in 1975, when they launched what became “The PBS NewsHour.” As the news world transformed around them with the arrival of 24-hour cable news and combative political talk shows, they maintained a reputation for sober, straightforward reporting and analysis.
The duo met in 1973 while anchoring public television’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings. Teaming up again two years later, they decided to offer a sophisticated supplement to the network nightly news, focusing on a single issue each night that they addressed in interviews with experts.
“We decided to do a program for the curious, and the informed, and the interested,” MacNeil later told the Toronto Star. “And it worked.”
Known early on as “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” the show anticipated network programs such as ABC’s “Nightline” and expanded from a 30-minute time slot to become the country’s first national, hourlong nightly news broadcast in 1983.
Although it was accused at times of being boring and elitist, the program developed a loyal audience, with about 5 million viewers tuning in each night by the time Mr. MacNeil retired as executive editor and co-anchor in 1995.
“In Mr. MacNeil and Mr. Lehrer, ‘The NewsHour’ has the only two major anchors on television who actually practice journalism,” New York Times media critic John Corry wrote in 1983. “They ask questions and then listen to the answers. Network anchors just read the news.”
In addition to Lehrer, who remained as the sole anchor after MacNeil’s retirement and who died in 2020, “NewsHour” has featured journalists including Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Elizabeth Farnsworth, Gwen Ifill, Roger Mudd and Judy Woodruff.
MacNeil had a distinctive and reassuring baritone, with a cultivated accent that complemented Lehrer’s folksier delivery. He saw himself as a writer trapped in a broadcaster’s body — he and Lehrer were both novelists in addition to newscasters — and said that he turned to journalism in financial desperation while struggling to make a living as a playwright in London.
He began writing for Reuters in 1955 and, five years later, joined NBC News as a foreign correspondent, covering fighting in the Belgian Congo, the Algerian war of independence and the construction of the Berlin Wall. After moving to the network’s Washington bureau, he was assigned to cover President John F. Kennedy’s November 1963 visit to Dallas, where he was sitting at the front of a press bus when shots rang out.
MacNeil ran off the bus, followed police officers up a grassy knoll and searched for a phone to call his editor. Sprinting toward the Texas School Book Depository, the building from which Lee Harvey Oswald was later found to have shot Kennedy, he came face to face with a “young guy in shirt sleeves” who suggested that MacNeil “ask inside” for a phone.
“I didn’t register his face because I was obsessed with finding a phone,” MacNeil told the Canadian Press in 2013. “Much later,” he added, “it occurred to me that I was going in just about the time Oswald had been going out.”
A decade later — while moderating “Washington Week in Review,” his first job at PBS — he started covering the Watergate hearings with Lehrer, with whom he bonded over shared literary interests. They spent more than 300 hours together in front of the camera, anchoring live coverage of the Senate hearings that helped lead to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
MacNeil and Lehrer received an Emmy Award for their Watergate coverage and soon formed “The Robert MacNeil Report,” initially broadcast by WNET in New York, with Lehrer serving as Washington correspondent. After a few months, the show was distributed nationally by PBS and renamed “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” with the two men as co-anchors.
The duo formed a production company in 1981, making “NewsHour” the only major nightly news show to be independently produced and owned by its anchors.
With their focus on informing rather than entertaining, the anchors joked that the show’s motto was, “We dare to be boring.” “NewsHour” left coverage of sensational stories such as the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial to the major networks, gravitating instead toward foreign conflicts, trade negotiations, nuclear arms deals and the like.
MacNeil interviewed foreign leaders including Ayatollah Khomeini, who was exiled in France when he urged Iranians to overthrow the Shah, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who two decades earlier had placed the young foreign correspondent under house arrest in Havana during the Cuban missile crisis.
Backed by corporate sponsors such as PepsiCo and AT&T, the show endured despite being eclipsed in the ratings by the major network programs and facing a budget shortfall that contributed to MacNeil’s decision to retire on its 20-year anniversary.
“I think we helped create a place for a civil discourse and respect for complexity in a medium which often respects neither — you could even argue increasingly respects neither,” he told the Times in 1995, shortly before stepping down. “Those aren’t small things.”