Robert MacNeil, the first anchor of what’s now known as PBS NewsHour, died Friday at the age of 93.
MacNeil died of natural causes according to his daughter Alison. He was at New York-Presbyterian Hospital at the time of his death.
The journalist started with his own PBS show, the Robert MacNeil Report on WNET-TV in 1975. In 1983 the program was re-branded as the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, when the late Jim Lehrer joined as co-anchor.
Two years into his first show, MacNeil won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Broadcast Journalism. MacNeil anchored the show alongside Lehrer for two decades. The later iterations of the show would go on to win multiple Emmys for its reporting.
While simultaneously working as a news anchor, MacNeil wrote a series called the Story of English, which won him another Emmy. He would also write a book on the topic, which was one of six books he wrote on topics varying from language to autobiographical.
PBS expressed its NewsHour staff was “saddened” to hear of MacNeil’s passing as his time with the network was “the turning point for the future of daily news on PBS.”
“A lifelong lover of language, literature and the arts, MacNeil’s trade was using words. Combined with his reporter’s knack for being where the action was, he harnessed that passion to cover some of the biggest stories of his time, while his refusal to sensationalize the news sprung from respect for viewers,” PBS wrote in a post on X. “He was on the ground in Dallas when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He interviewed Martin Luther King Jr., Ayatollah Khomeini, and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But he had his biggest breakthrough with the 1973 gavel-to-gavel primetime coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings.”
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“We’ve lost a member of our NewsHour family, and journalism has lost a giant,” current PBS NewsHour host Amna Nawaz wrote of MacNeil. “My heart is with the family and friends of Robin [sic] MacNeil, co-founder and longtime co-anchor of the NewsHour. His extraordinary legacy lives on in the work we do today.”
MacNeil is survived by his children Cathy MacNeil, Ian MacNeil, Alison MacNeil, William MacNeil his brother, and five grandchildren.