Robert MacNeil, the Canadian-born journalist who delivered sober night newscasts for greater than 20 years on PBS because the co-anchor of “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” later expanded as “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” died early Friday in Manhattan. He was 93.
His loss of life, at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Alison MacNeil.
Mr. MacNeil hung out at NBC Information early in his profession and was a reporter for the community in Dallas on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. However he got here to reject the flashier fashion of the business American networks, and in 1971 he joined the fledgling Public Broadcasting Service.
He introduced with him a information sensibility honed on the BBC, the place he had labored within the interim, and have become a key determine in shaping U.S. public tv’s in-depth and evenhanded method to information protection.
A pairing with Jim Lehrer in 1973 to cowl the Senate Watergate hearings for PBS was unpopular with the operators of many native public stations, who thought the prime-time broadcasts weren’t acceptable night fare. However the two males’s severe demeanor was successful with viewers, and the broadcasts gained an Emmy Award and ultimately launched a permanent collaboration.
In October 1975, some main public stations started carrying the “The Robert MacNeil Report,” a half-hour of Mr. MacNeil’s design that examined a single situation every night time and shunned showy manufacturing values. Inside a 12 months this system was renamed “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.” It was expanded once more in 1983 to turn out to be “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” a multitopic program that was the nation’s first full hour of night information.
This system supplied a stark counterpoint to the ever-frothier newscasts on the business networks’ native associates and was honored with each main broadcast journalism award.
Intensely non-public in public, Mr. MacNeil was identified to associates as participating and wickedly humorous. He was happy with his no-nonsense fashion on air, which critics referred to as boring however which he referred to as civilized discourse within the public curiosity. One memorable instance was his hourlong interview in 1985 with Fidel Castro, wherein Mr. Castro reluctantly defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, partially as a result of he would by no means “be on the aspect of the US.’’
Mr. MacNeil defended his interviewing fashion and his program’s unsensational method to weighty subjects. “I can not stand the theatrical, prosecutorial interview, the interview designed to attract consideration to the interviewer, stuffed with both mawkish, false sentiment or theatrically belligerent questioning,” he informed The New York Occasions in 1995, when he retired from the every day newscast.
“Each journalist on this nation has a stake within the democratic system working, and I feel establishments of democracy are price taking significantly,” he added. “It’s a really old style, corny view, however Jim and I each really feel that strongly, which is likely one of the causes our present is the best way it’s.”
Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil, generally known as Robin, was born on Jan. 19, 1931, in Montreal and raised within the port metropolis of Halifax, Nova Scotia. His father, Robert A.S. MacNeil, served within the Royal Canadian Navy throughout World Battle II, commanding convoy escort ships, and later joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His mom Margaret (Oxner) MacNeil, was left to lift her kids alone for a number of years whereas her husband was at battle.
Whereas Mr. MacNeil was attending Dalhousie College in Halifax, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. noticed him in a faculty manufacturing of “Othello,” and he was employed to behave in CBC radio productions and ultimately a every day radio cleaning soap opera.
He quickly dropped out of school to attempt his hand full time at stage performing, however determined that he was higher suited to be a playwright and returned to highschool, this time at Carleton College in Ottawa. Whereas nonetheless a scholar he labored as a nationwide radio announcer for the CBC after which for the CBC’s new tv service, the place he additionally hosted a kids’s program.
After graduating, he moved to England to write down performs, however shortly turned to journalism to generate profits. He informed The Occasions in 1995, “I had a type of golden careers; it simply floated.”
In 1960, after 5 years on the Reuters information company in London, Mr. MacNeil joined NBC Information, ultimately changing John Chancellor as a wide-ranging overseas correspondent, overlaying wars in Africa and the Cuban missile disaster. (For a couple of week after that October 1962 episode, he and 5 different journalists had been held beneath home arrest in a Havana lodge by the Castro authorities.) He was current on the development of the Berlin Wall and later lined its dismantling in 1989.
Mr. MacNeil was assigned to cowl Washington in 1963 and was on his first presidential journey on Nov. 22 when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Whereas his work overlaying the killing was overshadowed by that of his NBC Information colleagues, he could have had his personal brush with the drama of that day.
After the pictures had been fired in Dealey Plaza, Mr. MacNeil made his approach to the closest constructing, the Texas Faculty Guide Depository — the constructing from which the deadly pictures had been fired. There, he requested a person who was leaving and one other within the foyer the place the closest phone was. Kennedy’s accused murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald, later informed the Dallas police that he had encountered a Secret Service agent on the constructing. The historian William Manchester concluded in his 1967 ebook, “The Dying of a President,” that the person within the swimsuit, crew minimize and press badge was, in actual fact, Mr. MacNeil.
In his autobiography, “The Proper Place on the Proper Time” (1982), Mr. MacNeil wrote that “it was doable, however I had no approach of confirming that both of the younger males I had spoken to was Oswald.”
In 1965, Mr. MacNeil turned the co-anchor, with Ray Scherer, of NBC’s half-hour weekend information broadcast, “The Scherer-MacNeil Report.” However two years later he returned to London, reporting for the BBC’s “Panorama” program, earlier than becoming a member of PBS in 1971.
Mr. MacNeil, who had properties in Manhattan and Nova Scotia, turned an American citizen in 1997 and was made an officer within the Order of Canada the identical 12 months. He mirrored on his life as a twin citizen in a 2003 memoir, “Searching for My Nation: Discovering Myself in America.”
His spouse, Donna MacNeil, died in 2015. His first marriage, to Rosemarie Coopland, led to divorce, as did his second marriage, to Jane Doherty.
He’s survived by two kids from his first marriage, Ian MacNeil, a theatrical set designer who gained a Tony in 2009 for his work on musical “Billy Elliott,” and Cathy MacNeil; two kids from his second marriage, Alison and Will MacNeil; and 5 grandchildren.
After retiring from the every day newscast, Mr. MacNeil continued to work with PBS, together with internet hosting the “America at a Crossroads” collection of documentaries in 2007, which examined the nation’s challenges within the post-9/11 world. With Mr. Lehrer, his shut pal, he remained a companion in MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, which produced their newscast till 2014, when WETA, the Washington, D.C., public media station the place the “NewsHour” relies, assumed possession. Mr. Lehrer died in 2020 at 85.
Mr. MacNeil discovered himself on the middle of controversy in 2011 when, returning to “NewsHour” for a six-part collection on autism, he featured the story of his grandson Nick. He was criticized for permitting his daughter Alison to query whether or not her son’s autism was linked to vaccines. (He did qualify her feedback by noting that “public well being authorities say there isn’t any scientifically legitimate proof that vaccines trigger autism.”)
Mr. MacNeil chaired the board of the MacDowell Colony (now generally known as MacDowell), the retreat for artists, writers and musicians in Peterborough, N.H., from 1993 to 2010. After leaving the “NewsHour,” he returned to his past love, writing. He was the creator of “The Individuals Machine” (1968), concerning the relationship between tv and politics; three memoirs; and 4 novels — “Burden of Want” (1992), “The Voyage” (1995), “Breaking Information” (1998) and “Portrait of Julia” (2013).
He was a co-author of “The Story of English,” a companion quantity to the 1986 BBC-PBS tv collection that he hosted, and he wrote its 2005 sequel, “Do You Converse American?”
Mr. MacNeil remained happy with his early night newscast. In interviews for the Archive of American Tv in 2000 and 2001, he was requested how he needed to be remembered.
“Tv has modified journalism, totally, not only for tv, however for print and everyone else,” he stated. “It’s modified the entire tradition and ethos of journalism. And to have been in a position maintain the road — maybe Canute-like — in opposition to a tide that’s going to engulf us all in the long run, for just a few years, has been a supply of gratification to me.”
Sofia Poznansky contributed reporting
