NBC News

• 1. Introduction

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  NBC News aired the first regularly scheduled television newscast in American history on the 21st of February, 1940, anchored by Lowell Thomas. What began as a nightly broadcast reaching perhaps five thousand television sets would grow into a news division that covered Moon landings, presidential assassinations, and political scandals spanning nearly a century. How does a single newscast evolve into a sprawling empire of morning shows, evening bulletins, Sunday interview programs, and streaming services? And what happens when the division entrusted with informing the public becomes news itself? NBC News sits at the center of some of the most consequential moments in American media history, and the story of how it got there is far more complicated than any single broadcast.

• 2. The Earliest Broadcasts

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  Lowell Thomas, born in 1892, anchored those first weeknight newscasts at 6:45 pm, speaking to an audience so small it could barely fill a stadium. The technical limitations of early television shaped everything. In June 1940, NBC's flagship New York station W2XBS broadcast more than thirty hours of Republican National Convention coverage live from Philadelphia, threading signals through a series of relay stations all the way to Schenectady. It was among the first true network broadcasts in American television history.

  War brought constraints. Live coverage of the 1944 conventions was impossible due to wartime and technical restrictions, though filmed footage reportedly aired the following day. In the final months of World War II, a program called The War As It Happens reached viewers in New York, Philadelphia, and Schenectady. After the war, NBC Television Newsreel ran filmed highlights with narration, evolving by 1948 into Camel Newsreel Theatre once Camel Cigarettes came on as sponsor. John Cameron Swayze joined as an on-camera anchor in 1949, and the program was renamed Camel News Caravan. The same year NBC teamed up with Life magazine to cover President Harry S. Truman's surprising defeat of New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. Television's audience was tiny, but NBC's share in New York was double that of any competing outlet. In 1950, a young Washington correspondent named David Brinkley joined the Caravan, though he attracted little attention for years.

• 3. Huntley, Brinkley, and Civil Rights

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  On the 29th of October, 1956, the Huntley-Brinkley Report debuted, created by producer Reuven Frank. The pairing of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley turned two journalists into celebrities. For much of the show's fourteen-year run, it outdrew CBS News, anchored first by Douglas Edwards and then, from April 1962, by Walter Cronkite. NBC president Robert Kintner gave the news division generous financial resources and air time, and trade observers called it television's champion of news coverage.

  NBC's vice president of news J. Davidson Taylor was determined that the network would lead coverage of the civil rights movement. In 1955, Frank McGee, then news director at NBC's Montgomery affiliate WSFA-TV, reported on Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott. A year later, John Chancellor covered the admission of Black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. A prominent U.S. senator later said that when he thought of Little Rock, he thought of John Chancellor. Reporter Richard Valeriani was hit with an ax handle at a demonstration in Marion, Alabama, in 1965 while covering the movement.

  Space coverage also consumed enormous resources. NBC configured its largest facility, Studio 8H, entirely for space missions, filling it with models of rockets and spacecraft, Earth and Moon maps, and animated figures made by puppeteer Bil Baird to depict astronaut movements before on-board cameras were possible. Coverage of the first Moon landing in 1969 earned the network an Emmy Award. Studio 8H had previously been home to the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and it would later become the home of Saturday Night Live.

• 4. The Kennedy Assassination and Its Aftermath

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  On the 22nd of November, 1963, at 1:45 pm, NBC interrupted its affiliate programming to report that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. Eight minutes later, at 1:53:12 pm, the network cut to Chet Huntley, Bill Ryan, and Frank McGee, though for those first minutes the reporting was audio only; no camera was in service. NBC did not begin airing pictures until 1:57 pm. What followed was seventy-one hours of uninterrupted news coverage. NBC broadcast the only live footage of the shooting of Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters as Oswald was led away in handcuffs.

  Bill McAndrew had been managing NBC News since 1951, and was formally named president of the division in 1965. He served until his death in 1968. His executive vice president, producer Reuven Frank, succeeded him and held the presidency until 1973. The chain of command above McAndrew had been reorganized by Kintner in the late 1950s so that the news chief reported directly to the network's top executive, a structural shift that reflected how seriously NBC had come to regard its news division.

• 5. Nightly News and the Rating Wars

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  Huntley retired in 1970, and NBC's ratings lead collapsed almost immediately. He died of cancer four years later, in 1974. NBC's primary evening newscast took its current name, NBC Nightly News, on the 3rd of August, 1970, but the transition was rocky. The network rotated through anchors including Brinkley, Frank McGee, and John Chancellor, and despite Chancellor's measured delivery and occasional first-place finishes, Nightly News spent most of the 1970s as a strong second.

  By the end of the decade, a resurgent ABC News led by Roone Arledge posed a new threat. Tom Brokaw became sole anchor in 1983, after sharing the desk with Roger Mudd for a year. In 1986 and 1987, NBC won the top Nielsen spot for the first time in years, though a change in Nielsen's rating methodology soon knocked it back. In late 1996, Nightly News moved into first place again and held it through most of the following years. Brian Williams assumed primary anchor duties when Brokaw retired in December 2004.

  In 1993, a Dateline NBC report on the safety of General Motors trucks contained footage that had been staged, with explosive devices attached to the gas tanks and improper sealants. GM discovered the manipulation, filed an anti-defamation lawsuit, and NBC publicly admitted the results had been rigged, settling with the automaker the same day the lawsuit was filed.

• 6. Scandal, Misconduct, and the Weinstein Story

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  In February 2015, NBC suspended anchor Brian Williams for six months after he admitted to telling an inaccurate story about his experience during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Lester Holt replaced him on an interim basis. On the 18th of June, 2015, NBC announced Holt would become the permanent anchor of Nightly News. Andrew Lack rejoined NBC News as chairman in March 2015 amid the firing and declining ratings.

  On the 29th of November, 2017, NBC News terminated Matt Lauer's employment. An unidentified female NBC employee had reported that Lauer sexually harassed her during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and that the conduct continued after both returned to New York. Former NBC News correspondent Linda Vester said that management's claim of ignorance was false, telling journalists that everyone knew Lauer was dangerous. Variety reported allegations from at least ten current and former colleagues.

  The Weinstein story adds another dimension. Ronan Farrow pitched NBC an investigation into sexual harassment in Hollywood. After a ten-month investigation by Farrow and NBC producer Rich McHugh, NBC chose not to publish it. With very few changes, the piece ran in the New Yorker magazine instead, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in April 2018. Farrow later said he had multiple named accusers willing to go on record and that the version NBC rejected was essentially the same version the New Yorker published. In his book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Farrow cited two sources within American Media, Inc. stating that the story was killed in response to a direct threat from Weinstein to expose Lauer's misconduct.

• 7. Structure and Spin-Off

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  Thirteen people have served as president of NBC News. Deborah Turness, who assumed the role in August 2013, became the first woman to lead the division. Rebecca Blumenstein was named president on the 10th of January, 2023. For decades the division sat at the center of a larger news empire that also included MSNBC and the business channels CNBC and CNBC World.

  In November 2024, Comcast announced that NBCUniversal would spin off most of its cable networks into a new company controlled by shareholders, later named Versant. The spin-off includes both CNBC and MSNBC. By October 2025, CNBC and MSNBC had begun separating their operations from NBC News. MSNBC rebranded as MS NOW on the 15th of November, 2025. Around the same time, NBC News laid off approximately 150 employees, a move that dismantled the dedicated teams producing the digital verticals NBC Asian America, NBC BLK, NBC Latino, and NBC Out. Several reporters including Ken Dilanian, Vaughn Hillyard, and Brandy Zadrozny moved to MS NOW, while Steve Kornacki left that network to take an analytics role at NBC News and NBC Sports.

  The division's flagship programs still anchor its identity. Meet the Press, which NBC has broadcast since 1947, is the longest-running American television series. The Today show, which launched in 1952, was described as the world's first morning television program of its genre. And the network's music ties reach back to 1985, when John Williams composed the theme called The Mission, used for Meet the Press, NBC Nightly News, and breaking news coverage ever since.