NBC News
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NBC News is the news division of American television network NBC. Its current president is Steve Capus.
Contents |
Current NBC News shows
- Today - a morning news and talk show (and its early morning variation Early Today)
- NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams - an early-evening news show
- Dateline NBC - a news magazine
- Meet the Press - a Sunday political talk show
Other NBC News productions
NBC News also provides content for the Internet, as well as cable-only news networks CNBC and MSNBC.
NBC also provides radio news bulletins at the top of the hour.
From 1982 to 1983, NBC News produced NBC News Overnight with anchors Linda Ellerbee, Lloyd Dobbins, and Bill Schechner. That program failed, but in 1991, NBC News aired another overnight news show called NBC Nightside, which originated from Charlotte, North Carolina. The 4 hour + show was anchored by Kim Hindrew, Tom Donavan, and Tom Miller. Kim Hindrew left for WMC in Memphis and was replaced by Tonya Strong. NBC Nightside lasted until 1999. NBC currently plans to launch another overnight news show for the spring of 2006.
NBC NewsChannel, a news video and report feed for NBC network affiliates, is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Current and Past NBC News Personalities
- Tom Brokaw
- Jane Pauley
- Stone Phillips
- John Chancellor
- Dave Garroway
- Jim Hartz
- Hugh Downs
- Bill Ryan
- David Brinkley
- Chet Huntley
- Frank McGee
- Barbara Walters
- Linda Ellerbee
- Lloyd Dobbins
- Robert Hager
- Douglas Kiker
- Carl Stern
- Catherine Mackin
- Matt Lauer
- Katie Couric
- Meredith Vieira (Beginning September 2006)
- Natalie Morales
- Bryant Gumbel
- Deborah Norville
- Brian Williams
- Ann Curry
- Maria Shriver
- Sander Vanocer
- Garrick Utley
- Ron Nessen
- Henry Champ
- John Palmer
- Bob Jamison
- Al Roker
- Willard Scott
- Gene Shalit
- Andrea Mitchell
- Robert Bazell
- Connie Chung
- Deborah Norville
- Lester Holt
- Tim Russert
- Campbell Brown
- David Gregory
NBC News History
While CBS News has received more attention from historians discussing broadcast journalism history, NBC's news operation was equal to it. From 1956 through 1970, the television broadcast team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley consistently exceeded the viewership levels attained by CBS News and its main anchor Walter Cronkite. The pair, together with fellow correspondent Frank McGee, distinguished itself in the coverage of American manned space missions in the Project Mercury, Project Gemini and Project Apollo programs, during an era when space missions rated continuous coverage. (An entire studio, Studio 8H, was configured for this coverage, complete with models and mockups of rockets and spacecraft, maps of the earth and moon to show orbital trackage, and stages on which animated figures created by puppeteer Bil Baird were used to depict movements of astronauts before on-board spacecraft television cameras were feasible. Studio 8H is now the home of the NBC entertainment program Saturday Night Live.) The dominance ended when Huntley retired. (Huntley died of cancer in 1974.) The loss of Huntley, along with a reluctance of RCA to fund NBC News at the level CBS was funding CBS News, left NBC News in the doldrums. NBC News did not recover viewership levels until after GE acquired RCA.
NBC News got the first American news interviews from two Russian presidents (Putin, Gorbachev), and Brokaw was the only American TV news correspondent to witness of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In the second Iraq war, NBC News and main anchor Tom Brokaw covered the war like no other television company, in part owning to the willingness of GE to fund it. NBC News correspondent David Bloom pushed through the GE and U.S. Department of Defense bureaucracies permission to construct a mobile news vehicle that could transmit live video broadcasts from the battlefield. The "Bloom-mobile" brought satellite images and videos (clear, detailed) into homes of America and Europe, live and one-on-one. Bloom did not live to accept the accolades after the armed conflict; he died of natural causes unrelated to combat during the final phase of the fighting.
NBC News also benefits from the GE corporate structure by having the ability to take reports from its cable counterpart MSNBC.
In 1993, Dateline NBC broadcast an investigative report about the safety of General Motors (GM) trucks. GM discovered the "actual footage" utilized in the broadcast had been rigged by the inclusion of explosive incendiaries attached to the gas tanks and the use of improper sealants for those tanks. GM subsequently filed an anti-defamation lawsuit against NBC. NBC publicly admitted the results of the tests were rigged and settled the lawsuit with GM. As a result of the controversy, several Dateline producers were fired.
NBC's primary news show, NBC Nightly News, is anchored by Brian Williams. He took over in December 2004 upon the retirement of his predecessor, Tom Brokaw.