Robert McNeil, legendary PBS news anchor, has died at the age of 93

New York
CNN
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Broadcast journalist Robert McNeil, who covered some of the biggest headlines of the 20th century and co-anchored the PBS Evening News for two decades, died Friday, PBS announced. He was 93 years old.

McNeil “was an incredibly knowledgeable reporter, broadcaster and writer who raised the standard of serious journalism in America,” Sharon Percy Rockefeller, president of NewsHour Productions, said Friday in a news release. “Principled, insightful and persistent, he and Jim Lehrer set the high standards of NewsHour journalism that remain the essential spirit of the program to this day.”

McNeil was born in Montreal, Canada, grew up in Nova Scotia and began his television career as a correspondent for NBC in London in 1960, according to Weta Public Radio. He has reported on international stories such as the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis before moving to a role in the United States outside of Washington, DC. In November 1963, he was covering President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on the day of the president's assassination, according to WETA.

Upon arriving at PBS in the early 1970s, MacNeil began a decades-long partnership with fellow journalist Jim Lehrer, According to the television program The two led PBS's coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. In 1975, the pair co-founded The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, the show that later became the PBS NewsHour. The broadcast has won more than 30 journalism awards over two decades, including two Emmy Awards and a 1994 Radio-Television Correspondents Association Award for Congressional Reporting, according to PBS and WETA.

MacNeil sat at the helm of the company alongside Lehrer before he left in 1995, according to PBS.

In his farewell speech to the crowd, he thanked viewers and public television “for the opportunity you have given me to work in a way that I can be proud of when I go home every night.”

After his retirement, he returned to PBS periodically to help with special coverage. One of his many books, “Do You Speak American?” Which details the development of the English language in the United States, was made into a PBS documentary in 2005.

MacNeil had a reputation for unimpeachable journalistic integrity and was known for his refusal to play into sensationalist news practices, often considered a quintessential hallmark of American broadcast media culture before the relaxation of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and the fracturing of today's news media.

Reflects his career in Sun Valley Writers Conference 2005“I don't know what's going to happen (regarding the evening news),” McNeil said. I have become more gentle, often more silly, and certainly more malleable under the pressure of the news. “The future is a little uncertain… It’s a different context for TV news than it was 40 years ago when I first started.”