New York –

Robert MacNeil created the PBS news program “The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” in the 1970s with his late partner Jim Lehrer He died on Friday after hosting the show for two decades. He is 93 years old.

McNeil died of natural causes at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to his daughter, Allison McNeil.

McNeil first came to prominence with the Public Broadcasting Service’s coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings, and in 1975 he began the half-hour “The Robert McNeil Report” on PBS with his friend Lehrer as resident reporter. Washington reporter.

The radio program later became “The MacNeil-Lehrer Report,” which was expanded to one hour in 1983 and renamed “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour.” The first one-hour evening newscast in the United States, it won multiple Emmy and Peabody Awards and is still on the air today, written by Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz (Amna Nawaz) as the anchor.

McNeil and Lehrer created the show after becoming disenchanted with the style and content of rival news programs from ABC, CBS and NBC.

“We don’t need to sell news,” McNeil told reporters chicago tribune 1983. “The Internet hypes the news to make it seem crucial. What’s missing [in 22 minutes] It’s the context, sometimes the balance, and the consideration of the issues that certain events raise. ”

After two decades, McNeil resigned as anchor of the NewsHour in 1995 to begin writing full-time. Lehrer took over the newscast on his own and remained there until 2009. Lehrer died in 2020.

When McNeil visited the show in October 2005 to commemorate its 30th anniversary, he recalled how their newscasts began before the advent of cable television.

“It’s a way of doing what journalism seems to require, but not in the same way that commercial network news (programs) do,” he said.

Wrote memoirs and novels

McNeil has written several books, including two memoirs, “The Right Place,” and the best-selling “Wordstruck,” as well as the novels “Burden of Desire” and “The Voyage.”

“Writing is more personal. It’s not as collaborative as television,” McNeil told The Associated Press in 1995. “But when you sit down to write a novel, it’s just you: This is what I think, this is what I want to be, and this is who I am.”

McNeil also created the 1986 Emmy Award-winning series “English Stories” with MacNeil-Lehrer Productions and is co-author of a companion book of the same name.

He co-authored another book on language, Do You Speak American? ” was adapted into a PBS documentary in 2005.

Exploring post-9/11 challenges

In 2007, he served as host of the PBS program “America at the Crossroads,” a six-night program exploring the challenges facing the United States in the post-9/11 world.

Six years before the 9/11 attacks, while discussing sensationalism and frivolity in the press, he once said: “If something really serious did happen to this country — a stock market crash like the one in 1929, … the equivalent of Pearl Harbor – wouldn’t the news become very serious again? Wouldn’t people run away from the ‘hard copy’ and get excited?”

“Of course you will. You have to know what’s going on.”

That was certainly the case—for a while.

Born in Montreal in 1931 and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, McNeil graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955 before moving to London to begin his journalism career at Reuters. In 1960, he turned to television news, working as a foreign correspondent for NBC in London.

In 1963, McNeil was transferred to NBC’s Washington bureau, where he covered civil rights and White House issues. He covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and spent much of 1964 covering the presidential campaign between Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, and Republican Barry Goldwater .

In 1965, McNeil became the New York anchor of “The Sherrer-McNeil Report,” NBC’s first half-hour weekend network newscast. While in New York, he also hosted local news broadcasts and several NBC News documentaries, including “Big Ears” and “The Right to Bear Arms.”

In 1967, McNeil returned to London as a correspondent for the BBC’s Panorama series. At the BBC you can cover American stories such as the clashes between anti-war demonstrators and Chicago police at the 1968 Democratic Convention, as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert F. Kennedy and President Dwight Eisenhower. funeral.

In 1971, McNeil left the BBC to become a senior correspondent at PBS, where he teamed up with Lehrer to co-anchor the public television station’s Emmy-winning coverage of the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings.