Editor-DN
Robert McNeil, Canadian-born journalist who created an even-handed, no-nonsense PBS newscast MacNeil Lehrer News Hour in the 1970s and co-anchored the show with his late partner Jim Lehrer for two decades, died Friday. He was 93 years old.
McNeil died of natural causes at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to his daughter Allison McNeil.
Born in Montreal in 1931, McNeil grew up in Halifax and graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955.
He worked as a radio and television host at the CBC during the early and mid-1950s, including a stint as host of a weekly children’s show. Let’s go to the museum.
McNeill then moved to London to work with Reuters. He later turned to TV news and moved to America in the 1960s.
McNeil first gained prominence for the public broadcasting service for its coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings and began its own half-hour. Robert McNeill reports on PBS in 1975 as a Washington correspondent with his friend Lehrer.
The broadcast was made. McNeil Lehrer Report And then, in 1983, it was extended to an hour and renamed. MacNeil Lehrer News Hour. The nation’s first one-hour evening newscast, and recipient of several Emmy and Peabody Awards, it still airs today with Jeff Bennett and Amina Nawaz as anchors.
It was McNeil and Lehrer’s frustration with the style and content of rival news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC that led to the creation of the program.
“We don’t need to sell news,” McNeil told the Chicago Tribune in 1983. Networks promote news to make it seem important, important. (22 minutes in) What’s missing is context, sometimes balance and consideration. of the questions that arise from certain events.”
McNeill left anchoring duties. News Hour to write full-time in 1995 after two decades. Lehrer single-handedly took over the newscast, and remained there until 2009. Lehrer died in 2020.
Authored several books.
When McNeill visited the show to commemorate its 30th anniversary in October 2005, he recalled how his newscasts began in the days before cable television.
“It was a way of doing something that felt journalistically necessary and yet was different from what commercial network news (programs) were doing,” he said.
MacNeil wrote several books, including two memoirs. Right place at right time And best seller Wordstruckand novels The burden of desire And Travel.
McNeil told The Associated Press in 1995, “Writing is very personal. It’s not collaborative in the way that television should be.” “But when you’re sitting down to write a novel, it’s just you: Here’s what I think, here. What I want to do. And this is me.”
A foreign journalist rediscovers his Canadian roots by writing a novel set during the Halifax bombing.
McNeil also created the Emmy-winning 1986 series English storywith the MacNeil-Lehrer production company, and co-authored the companion book of the same name.
Another book on language that he co-wrote, do you speak americanwas adapted into a PBS documentary in 2005.
In 2007, he served as host. America at a crossroadsA six-night PBS package exploring the challenges facing the United States in a post-9/11 world.
Six years before the 9/11 attacks, discussing sensationalism and frivolity in the news business, he said: “If something really serious happened to the nation—the stock market crash of 1929, . . . Equivalent to Pearl Harbor. Won’t the news become serious again? Won’t people run away from ‘hard copy’ and titillation?”
“Of course you will. You have to know what’s going on.”
Covered the JFK assassination.
That was the case – for a while.
After taking a job with NBC in London in 1960 as a foreign correspondent, McNeil was transferred to NBC’s Washington bureau in 1963, where he reported on civil rights and the White House.
He covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and may have crossed paths with assassin Lee Harvey Oswald when he searched for telephones in the area, he told The Canadian Press in a 2013 interview. Told to
Historian William Manchester reported that Oswald recalled talking to a man who matched McNeil’s description of the phone, but other historians disagree on whether McNeil and Oswald had this conversation. The day was discussed.
McNeil spent much of 1964 following the presidential campaign between Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, and Republican Barry Goldwater.
In 1965, McNeill became the New York anchor of the first half-hour weekend network news broadcast, The Scherer-MacNeil Report While based in New York at NBC, he also anchored local newscasts and several NBC news documentaries. big ears And Right to bear arms.
McNeill returned to London in 1967 as a reporter for the BBC Panorama With the BBC, the series covered American stories such as the clashes between anti-war protesters and Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic convention, and the funerals of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Sen. Robert Kennedy and President Dwight Eisenhower.
In 1971, McNeill left the BBC to become a senior correspondent for PBS, where he joined Lehrer for public television’s Emmy-winning coverage of the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings. Worked together with
