The creator of the impartial, no-frills PBS broadcast, Robert MacNeil, co-anchored the program for 20 years with his late colleague, Jim Lehrer, and hosted the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour in the 1970s. He passed away on Friday. He was ninety-three. According to his daughter Alison MacNeil, MacNeil passed away at New York-Presbyterian Hospital from natural causes.
Robert MacNeil Cause of Death:
The journalist Robert MacNeil, who was born in Canada and co-anchored “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” which subsequently became “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” on PBS for more than 20 years, gave nightly severe newscasts. He passed away in Manhattan early on Friday. He was ninety-three. His daughter Alison MacNeil announced his death at NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital.
Profession of Robert MacNeil:
Early in his career, Mr. MacNeil worked for NBC News, where he was a correspondent in Dallas on the day of President John F. Kennedy’s murder. Nevertheless, he eventually grew disenchanted with the ostentatious programming of the for-profit American networks and enlisted in the Public Broadcasting Service in 1971.
He carried with him a new sense that he had developed while working as an interim at the BBC, and he played a significant role in establishing the thorough and impartial reporting style of public television in the United States.
The owners of some local public stations were against Jim Lehrer’s teaming with them in 1973 to cover the Senate Watergate hearings for PBS, believing the prime-time shows weren’t suitable for an evening show. However, audiences liked the two men’s serious approach, and the broadcasts went on to win an Emmy and eventually spark a long-lasting partnership.
The Interviewing Style of Robert MacNeil:
The “Robert MacNeil Report,” a half-hour program created by Mr. MacNeil that avoided ostentatious production standards and focused on a particular topic each night, was first shown on several significant public stations in October 1975. The show was renamed “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” after a year. The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, a multitopic show that was the country’s first full hour of nightly news, was enlarged once again in 1983. It was a sharp contrast to the increasingly frothy local affiliate newscasts on the commercial networks, and it won every major award for broadcast journalism.
Despite his intense privacy while in public, acquaintances knew Mr. MacNeil to be witty and incredibly entertaining. He was proud of his no-nonsense attitude on broadcast, dubbed dull by some but termed polite debate in the public interest. One particularly noteworthy instance was his hour-long interview with Fidel Castro in 1985, during which the latter grudgingly justified the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, citing his refusal to “be on the side of the United States.”
Mr. MacNeil defended his interviewing technique and his program’s unpretentious treatment of serious subjects. He said to The New York Times in 1995, after he had left the daily program, “I cannot stand the theatrical, prosecutorial interview, the interview designed to draw prominence to the interviewer, full of either mawkish, false sentiment or deliberately belligerent questioning.”
He said, “I think democratic institutions are worth taking seriously, and every journalist in this country has a stake in the democratic system functioning.” “It’s a very dated, sentimental viewpoint, but Jim and I both believe that is part of why our show is the way it is.”
About Robert MacNeil and His Family Background:
Born in Montreal on January 19, 1931, Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil, also known as Robin, grew up in Halifax, a harbour city in Nova Scotia. During World War II, his father, Robert A.S. MacNeil, commanded convoy escort ships in the Royal Canadian Navy before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. While her husband was at war, his mother, Margaret (Oxner) MacNeil, was left to raise her children by herself for some years.
After seeing Mr. MacNeil in a school production of “Othello,” a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. engaged him to perform in CBC radio plays and later a daily radio soap opera. Mr MacNeil was a student at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
He quickly left college to pursue a career in stage performing full-time, but after deciding that playwriting was his true calling, he returned to Carleton University in Ottawa. He began working for the CBC as a national radio announcer while still a student, and later, he became a host of a children’s show on the CBC’s new television channel.
After graduating, he went to England to create plays, but he soon realized journalism was a more lucrative career choice. “I had one of those golden careers; it just floated,” he told The Times in 1995.
After five years with the London-based Reuters news agency, Mr. MacNeil joined NBC News in 1960. Eventually, he succeeded John Chancellor as a versatile foreign correspondent, covering the Cuban missile crisis and wars in Africa. (The Castro administration placed him and five other journalists under house arrest in a Havana hotel for almost a week following that October 1962 incident.) He documented the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 after seeing its building.
On his first presidential trip, Mr. MacNeil had been assigned to cover Washington when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963. Though that of his NBC News coworkers eclipsed his coverage of the murder, he could have seen some of the drama firsthand that day.
Mr. MacNeil went to the Texas School Book Depository, the closest structure and the site of the deadly gunshots, as soon as the rounds in Dealey Plaza were discharged. He asked one man in the lobby where the closest phone was and another man who was leaving. The man suspected of killing John F. Kennedy, subsequently admitted to the Dallas police that he had seen a Secret Service agent at the building. In his 1967 book “The Death of a President,” historian William Manchester concluded that the guy with the press badge, crew cut, and suit was, in fact, Mr. MacNeil.
Mr MacNeil stated that “it was possible, but I had no way of confirming that either of the young men I had spoken to was Oswald” in his autobiography, “The Right Place at the Right Time” (1982).
Mr. MacNeil and Ray Scherer co-anchored NBC’s half-hour weekend news program, “The Scherer-MacNeil Report,” in 1965. However, after two years, he returned to London and began covering the BBC’s “Panorama” show before signing on with PBS in 1971.
In 1997, Mr. MacNeil—who had properties in both Manhattan and Nova Scotia—became an American citizen and was appointed an officer in the Order of Canada. In his memoir “Looking for My Country: Finding Myself in America,” published in 2003, he considered his life as a dual citizen.
Donna MacNeil, his spouse, passed away in 2015. His first marriage to Rosemarie Coopland and his second marriage to Jane Doherty ended in divorce.
Five grandkids, two children from his second marriage, Will and Alison MacNeil, and two from his first marriage, Ian MacNeil, a theatrical set designer who received a Tony Award in 2009 for his work on the musical “Billy Elliott,” survive him. Mr. MacNeil continued to work with PBS after leaving the daily program. In 2007, he hosted the “America at a Crossroads” series of films examining the country’s problems after 9/11. He continued to be a partner in MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, which produced their broadcast, with his close friend Mr. Lehrer, until 2014, when WETA, the public media outlet in Washington, D.C., which is home to the “NewsHour,” took over ownership. By 2020, Mr. Lehrer was 85 years old.
When Mr MacNeil told the tale of his grandson Nick in a six-part series on autism on “NewsHour” in 2011, he found himself at the heart of the controversy. He came under fire for letting his daughter Alison wonder if immunizations had anything to do with her son’s autism.
From 1993 to 2010, Mr. MacNeil served as head of the board of the MacDowell Colony, currently called MacDowell, a retreat for musicians, authors, and artists located in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Following his departure from the “NewsHour,” he returned to writing, his first love. In addition to three autobiographies, “The People Machine” (1968), which examined the connection between politics and television, and four novels, “Burden of Desire” (1992), “The Voyage” (1995), “Breaking News” (1998), and “Portrait of Julia” (2013), were written by him.
From 1993 to 2010, Mr. MacNeil served as head of the board of the MacDowell Colony, currently called MacDowell, a retreat for musicians, authors, and artists located in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Following his departure from the “NewsHour,” he returned to writing, his first love. In addition to three autobiographies, “The People Machine” (1968), which examined the connection between politics and television, and four novels, “Burden of Desire” (1992), “The Voyage” (1995), “Breaking News” (1998), and “Portrait of Julia” (2013), were written by him.
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