NEW YORK — NEW YORK (AP) — Robert MacNeil, who created the unbiased, straightforward PBS newscast “The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” in the 1970s and co-anchored the program with his late partner, Jim Lehrer, for two decades, died Friday -fair. He was 93 years old.
MacNeil died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to his daughter, Alison MacNeil.
MacNeil first came to prominence for his coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings for public service broadcasting and began his half-hour “Robert MacNeil Report” on PBS in 1975 with his friend Lehrer as Washington correspondent.
The broadcast became the “MacNeil-Lehrer Report” and then, in 1983, it was expanded to one hour and renamed the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.” The country’s first one-hour evening newscast and winner of multiple Emmy and Peabody awards, it remains on the air today with Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz as anchors.
It was MacNeil and Lehrer’s disenchantment with the style and content of rival ABC, CBS and NBC news programs that led to the creation of the program.
“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. What is missing (in 22 minutes) is context, sometimes balance, and a consideration of the questions that are raised by particular events.”
MacNeil left anchoring duties at “NewsHour” after two decades in 1995 to write full time. Lehrer took over the news on his own and remained there until 2009. Lehrer died in 2020.
When MacNeil visited the program in October 2005 to celebrate its 30th anniversary, he recalled how news began before cable television.
“It was a way of doing something that seemed necessary from a journalistic point of view, but that was different from what commercial network news (programs) did,” he said.
MacNeil has written several books, including two memoirs “The Right Place at the Right Time” and the best-selling “Wordstruck,” and the novels “Burden of Desire” and “The Voyage.”
“Writing is much more personal. It’s not collaborative like television should be,” MacNeil told the Associated Press in 1995. “But when you’re sitting down writing a novel, it’s just you: here’s what I think, here’s what I want to do. And it’s me.
MacNeil also created the 1986 Emmy-winning series “The Story of English” with production company MacNeil-Lehrer and co-authored the book of the same name.
Another book on language he co-wrote, “Do You Speak American?”, was adapted into a PBS documentary in 2005.
In 2007, he served as host of “America at a Crossroads,” a six-night PBS package that explored the challenges facing the United States in the post-9/11 world.
Six years before the September 11 attacks, when discussing sensationalism and frivolity in the news industry, he had said: “If something really serious were to happen to the nation—a stock market crash like the one in 1929,…the equivalent to a Pearl Harbor — wouldn’t the news get very serious again? Wouldn’t people shy away from “hard copy” and the excitement?”
“Of course you would. You would have to know what was going on.
That was the case – for a while.
Born in Montreal in 1931, MacNeil was raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955 before moving to London, where he began his journalistic career at Reuters. He switched to TV news in 1960, taking a job at NBC in London as a foreign correspondent.
In 1963, MacNeil transferred to NBC’s Washington bureau, where he reported on Civil Rights and the White House. He covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and spent most of 1964 following the presidential campaign between Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, and Republican Barry Goldwater.
In 1965, MacNeil became the New York anchor of the first half-hour weekend newscast, “The Scherer-MacNeil Report” on NBC. While in New York, he also hosted local newscasts and several NBC news documentaries, including “The Big Ear” and “The Right to Bear Arms.”
MacNeil returned to London in 1967 as a reporter for the British Broadcasting Corp. series “Panorama.” While on the BBC, U.S. stories will be covered, such as the clash between anti-war protesters and Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the funerals of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert Kennedy and President Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1971, MacNeil left the BBC to become a senior correspondent for PBS, where he joined Lehrer to co-anchor public television’s Emmy-winning coverage of the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings.
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Associated Press media writer David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.
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