Canadian-born journalist Robert McNeil ran a low-key nightly news show on PBS for more than 20 years as co-anchor of “The McNeil/Lehrer Report,” which later expanded to become the “McNeil/Lehrer News Hour.” He died early Friday morning in Manhattan. . He was 93 years old.
His death was confirmed at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital by his daughter, Alison McNeil.
Mr. McNeil worked at NBC News early in his career and was a reporter for the network in Dallas on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. But he came to reject the flashy style of American commercial networks, and joined the just-founded Public Broadcasting Service in 1971.
He brought a news sensibility honed to the BBC, where he worked during that time, and became a key figure in shaping American public television's thoroughly unbiased approach to news reporting.
In 1973, he teamed up with Jim Lehrer to cover the Senate Watergate hearings for PBS, which was unpopular with many local public broadcaster operators who considered prime-time broadcasts inappropriate for the evening. However, the pair's earnest demeanor was well-received by viewers, the broadcast won an Emmy Award, and a lasting collaboration eventually began.
In October 1975, some major public broadcasters began broadcasting the “Robert McNeil Report.'' It's a 30-minute compilation of Mr. McNeil's project, which investigates one problem each night and eliminates flashy production values. Within a year, the program was renamed the “McNeil/Lehrer Report.” It was expanded again in 1983 to become a multi-topic program called “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,'' the first of his one-hour evening news broadcasts in the United States.
The show provided a clear counterpoint to the news programs that were increasingly bubbling up on local affiliates of commercial networks, and won every major broadcast journalism award.
Mr. McNeil, a private man in public life, was known to friends as charming and terrifyingly funny. He was proud of the serious style of his broadcasts, which critics called boring, but which he called civilized discourse in the public interest. One memorable example is an hour-long interview with Fidel Castro in 1985 in which Castro reluctantly defended the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, in part because he said he would never ” I won't stand by his side.''
McNeil defended his interview style and the show's sensational approach to serious topics. “I can't stand theatrical prosecutor-style interviews, full of creepy false emotions and theatrical bellicose questions aimed at getting the interviewer's attention,” the Daily said. he told The New York Times in 1995, when he retired from news programming.
“Every journalist in this country has a stake in the functioning of our democratic institutions, and I think our democratic institutions are worth taking seriously,” he added. “It's a very outdated and corny view, but Jim and I both feel strongly about it. He's one of the reasons our show is the way it is.”
Robert Breckenridge Ware McNeil, known as Robin, was born on January 19, 1931 in Montreal and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His father, Robert AS McNeill, served in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His mother, Margaret (Ochsner) McNeil, supervised the household.
While Mr. McNeil was attending Dalhousie University in Halifax, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer saw him cast in the school's production of “Othello,” which led him to a CBC Radio production and eventually a daily radio soap opera. I was hired to appear on the show.
He soon dropped out of college to pursue a full-time career as a stage actor, but decided he was better suited as a playwright and returned to study at Carleton University in Ottawa. During his school days he worked as a national radio announcer for CBC and later also hosted a children's program on CBC's new television service.
After graduating, he moved to England to write plays, but soon turned to journalism to earn money. He told the Times in 1995: It just popped into my head. ”
After five years at Reuters in London, Mr. McNeil joined NBC News in 1960, eventually replacing Prime Minister John as foreign correspondent and covering a wide range of topics, including the war in Africa and the Cuban Missile Crisis. became. (For about a week after the October 1962 incident, he and five other journalists were placed under house arrest in a Havana hotel by the Castro regime.) He was present at the construction of the Berlin Wall and later at its dismantling in 1989. Interviewed.
Mr. McNeil was assigned to cover Washington in 1963 and was on his first presidential visit on Nov. 22, the day President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His job reporting murders was overshadowed by that of his colleagues at NBC News, but he may have had his own hand in writing about the drama of the day.
After the shooting took place at Dealey Plaza, Mr. McNeil went to the nearest building, the Texas School Book Depository, where the fatal shooting took place. So he asked the man leaving and another man in the lobby where the nearest phone was. Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, later told Dallas police that he encountered Secret Service agents inside the building. Historian William Manchester later concluded in his 1967 book The Death of a President that the man in the suit, crew cut, and press badge was actually Mr. McNeil.
“It was possible, but there was no way to confirm that either of the young men I spoke to was Oswald,” McNeil wrote in his autobiography “Right Time, Right Place” (1982). ” he wrote.
In 1965, Mr. McNeil co-anchored NBC's half-hour weekend newscast, “The Sherrer-McNeil Report,'' with Ray Sherrer. But after two years he returned to London and worked as a reporter on the BBC's “Panorama” program, after which in 1971 he joined PBS.
Mr. McNeil, who has homes in Manhattan and Nova Scotia, became an American citizen in 1997 and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada the same year. He reflected on his own life as a dual citizen in his 2003 memoir, Looking for My Country: Finding Myself in America.
His wife, Donna McNeil, passed away in 2015. His first marriage to Rosemary Copeland ended in divorce, as did his second marriage to Jane Doherty.
He has two children from his first marriage. Ian McNeil is a set designer who won a Tony Award in 2009 for his work on the musical “Billy Elliot,'' and the other is Cathy McNeil. two children from his second marriage, Alison and Will McNeil; and five grandchildren.
After retiring from daily news programming, Mr. McNeil continued to work for PBS, including as host of “America at the Crossroads.” In 2007, a series of documentaries were produced examining national challenges in a post-9/11 world. Along with his close friend Mr. Lehrer, he remained a partner in McNeil/Lehrer Productions, producing news programs until 2014 when ownership was taken over by WETA, the Washington, D.C., public media station that is home to “The News Hour.” was. Lehrer passed away in 2020 at the age of 85.
McNeil found himself at the center of controversy in 2011 when he returned to the NewsHour for a six-part series on autism, featuring the story of his grandson Nick. He was criticized for allowing his daughter Alison to question whether her son's autism was linked to vaccines. (He justified her comment by pointing out that “public health officials say there is no scientifically valid evidence that vaccines cause autism.”)
From 1993 to 2010, Mr. McNeil served as chairman of the board of the McDowell Colony (now known as McDowell), a retreat for artists, writers, and musicians in Peterborough, New Hampshire. After quitting the “NewsHour”, he returned to his first love and began his writing career. . He was the author of The People Machine (1968), about the relationship between television and politics. 3 memoirs. and four novels – Burden of Desire (1992), The Voyage (1995), Breaking News (1998), and Portrait of Julia (2013).
He co-authored “The Story of English,” a sister edition to the 1986 BBC-PBS television series he hosted, and wrote the 2005 sequel, “Do You Speak American?”
Mr. McNeil remained proud of his evening news program. In interviews with the American Television Archive in 2000 and 2001, he was asked how he would like to be remembered.
“Television has completely changed journalism, not just for television but for print and everyone else,” he said. “It changed the whole culture and ethos of journalism. And that we were able, perhaps like Canute, to hold the line for several years against the tide that would eventually engulf us all. was a source of satisfaction for me.”
Sofia Poznansky contributed reporting