Robert MacNeil, the Canadian-born journalist who created the even-handed, no-frills PBS newscast The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour in the 1970s and co-anchored the show with his late partner, Jim Lehrer, for two decades, died on Friday. He was 93.
MacNeil died of natural causes at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to his daughter, Alison MacNeil.
Born in Montreal in 1931, MacNeil was raised in Halifax and graduated from Ottawa’s Carleton University in 1955.
He worked at CBC as a radio and television host during the early and mid-1950s, including a stint as host of the weekly children’s show Let’s Go To The Museum.
MacNeil then moved to London to work with Reuters. He later switched to TV news and moved to the United States in the 1960s.
MacNeil first gained prominence for his coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings for the public broadcasting service 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, was expanded to an hour and renamed the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. The nation’s first one-hour evening news broadcast, and recipient of several Emmy and Peabody awards, it remains on the air today with Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz as anchors.
It was MacNeil’s and Lehrer’s disenchantment with the style and content of rival news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC that led to the program’s creation.
“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’s missing [in 22 minutes] is context, sometimes balance, and a consideration of questions that are raised by certain events.”
MacNeil left anchoring duties at NewsHour after two decades in 1995 to write full time. Lehrer took over the newscast alone, and he remained there until 2009. Lehrer died in 2020.
Authored several books
When MacNeil visited the show in October 2005 to commemorate its 30th anniversary, he reminisced about how their newscast started in the days before cable television.
“It was a way to do something that seemed to be needed journalistically and yet was different from what the commercial network news (programs) were doing,” he said.
MacNeil wrote several books, including two memoirs The Right Place at the Right Time and the best seller Wordstruck, and the novels Burden of Desire and The Voyage.
“Writing is much more personal. It is not collaborative in the way that television must 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.”
An expat journalist rediscovers his Canadian roots by writing a novel set during the Halifax Explosion.
MacNeil also created the Emmy-winning 1986 series The Story of English, with the MacNeil-Lehrer production company, and was co-author of the companion book of the same name.
Another book on language that 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 exploring challenges confronting 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 had said: “If something really serious did happen to the nation — a stock market crash like 1929, … the equivalent of a Pearl Harbor — wouldn’t the news get very serious again? Wouldn’t people run from ‘hard copy’ and titillation?”
“Of course you would. You’d have to know what was going on.”
Covered JFK assassination
That was the case — for a while.
After taking a job with NBC in London in 1960 as a foreign correspondent, MacNeil 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 even crossed paths with killer Lee Harvey Oswald without realizing it as he searched for a telephone in the area, he told The Canadian Press in a 2013 interview.
Historian William Manchester reported that Oswald recalled speaking to a man who matched MacNeil’s description about a phone, but other historians differ on whether MacNeil and Oswald did interact that day.
MacNeil 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 network news broadcast, The Scherer-MacNeil Report on NBC. While in New York, he also anchored 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 BBC’s Panorama series. While with the BBC, be covered such U.S. stories as the clash between anti-war demonstrators and the 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, MacNeil left the BBC to become a senior correspondent for PBS, where he teamed up with Lehrer to co-anchor public television’s Emmy-winning coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973.