Fifty years ago today, Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer brought viewers like you a novel way to watch news: a half-hour evening program, free of commercials, that aimed to tell one in-depth story per night. Over the next five decades, that show has morphed into what we now know as the PBS News Hour.
Though our format has changed – from 30 minutes to 60, from on air to online and across social media, from Robin and Jim to Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff, and now Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett – our mission to deliver in-depth, reliable reporting has remained constant.
Here are 10 important moments in PBS News history.
PBS News' storied history begins with gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings, broadcast nationally in the fall of 1973. Congress was investigating the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters and the subsequent coverup by President Richard Nixon.
Helmed by MacNeil and Lehrer, the coverage sometimes extended late into the night. It continued for 49 days.
Their efforts paid off. The team "convinced a lot of people that public television could do news and public affairs honorably and fairly and responsibly," MacNeil said in 2005.
Ultimately, Nixon resigned from office in 1974, before Congress could vote on articles of impeachment. The Robert MacNeil Report, a 30-minute show, launched a year later, in the fall of 1975.
With little fanfare (aside from the horns in our theme song), the MacNeil/Lehrer Report became the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in 1983, expanding from a 30-minute program that focused deeply on one topic to an hourlong newscast that also covered the important stories of the day.
"We started as a complement [to other nightly news shows] because we couldn't be much more than that, and we ended up, starting in 1983, as an alternative," MacNeil said in a retrospective on the News Hour in 2005.
While the new show tried some format experiments that didn't stick – the first episodes included a visual "postcard" of a soothing moment, and spread out the news of the day instead of delivering a news summary at the top – the extra half-hour gave the show room to expand and breathe. Plus, the new News Hour stayed focused and "gimmick-free," as MacNeil described it.
"We have always said if you want to be entertained, don't watch us," Lehrer said. "Go to the circus."
Reported cases of AIDS hit new highs in 1985, a time when, as Judy Woodruff said, there was "no cure, treatment or preventative vaccine in sight." Misinformation, fear and discrimination abounded on how the disease is transmitted.
By Sept. 4 of that year, almost 16,500 people had been diagnosed, more than double the number of cases from seven months earlier. That day, the News Hour devoted most of its program to sober, fact-based conversations about the disease and the social fallout for patients. The show introduced viewers to two people whose lives had been upended: Gar Traynor, a flight attendant from San Francisco who was fired after he told his employer he had AIDS, as well as Ryan White, an Indiana boy with hemophilia who became an icon and namesake for the movement to help HIV/AIDS patients. At the time, White was attending school via telephone because he wasn't allowed to attend in person.
Researcher Mathilde Krim later argued fervently for the rights of people diagnosed with AIDS.
"To segregate patients with clinical symptoms of AIDS does not protect anybody. It causes a lot of heartbreak and injustice," Krim told Judy Woodruff.
When activist and future South African President Nelson Mandela was released from his decadeslong political imprisonment in Feb. 1990, Charlayne Hunter-Gault traveled to Mandela's home to interview him.
As one of the first correspondents to join the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1977, Hunter-Gault had regularly covered the struggle against apartheid, first traveling to South Africa in 1985 and remaining in close contact with members of the African National Congress.
Because of those connections, she was one of only two journalists granted a half-hour-long interview with Mandela.
They discussed the brutal treatment he endured in prison, the development of "an underground channel of communication" to make sure prisoners could get political education, and his discomfort with his mythologized image.
Hunter-Gault remained in contact with Mandela over the years and interviewed him more than almost any other journalist, as she recalled when Mandela died in 2013.
President Bill Clinton sat down for an extended interview with Jim Lehrer just as reports broke that independent counsel Ken Starr had expanded his investigation of Clinton to examine a possible sexual relationship with a White House intern.
In an interview that spanned nearly the whole hourlong show, Lehrer got straight to the point.
"The news of this day is that Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel, is investigating allegations that you suborned perjury by encouraging a 24-year-old woman, former White House intern, to lie under oath in a civil deposition about her having had an affair with you," Lehrer said. "Mr. President, is that true?"
"I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth. There is no improper relationship," Clinton said.
Lehrer prodded Clinton further, but the president remained steadfast that there "is no improper relationship." Nearly 11 months later, Clinton was impeached by the House for lying under oath and obstructing justice related to his involvement with Monica Lewinsky.
"Terrorists used hijacked airliners to kill Americans on this Sept. 11, 2001. Another day of infamy for the United States of America."
That's how Lehrer opened the newscast hours after hijackers flew passenger jets into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 Americans died, making 9/11 the single deadliest day due to a foreign attack in U.S. history.
At the time of the crash, a News Hour producer had been at the Pentagon, less than three miles from WETA's television studios, and captured live footage of the aftermath. Another News Hour producer and cameraman captured footage from nearby rooftops and spoke to eyewitnesses.
After MacNeil and Lehrer stepped down from the anchor desk in 1995 and 2009, respectively, different correspondents rotated through.
That ended in 2013, when Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff were named as MacNeil and Lehrer's successors. While newscasts besides the News Hour employed two anchors, no American nightly television news broadcast had ever been led by two women.
That year, the News Hour underwent a series of structural changes, revamping the look and graphics, adding a 30-minute weekend show and making history by cementing the Woodruff/Ifill team.
The two had shared the desk before and worked together covering conventions, elections and other news events. At the end of their first show as official co-anchors and managing editors on Sept. 9, 2013, Ifill and Woodruff fist-bumped, a gesture they would repeat time and again.
By the middle of March 2020, the worsening novel coronavirus outbreak had become a terrifyingly unpredictable pandemic, suddenly halting American public life.
As the global death toll grew, President Donald Trump issued travel restrictions and economic relief measures. The stock market experienced its worst day since 1987, public schools across the country began to close, sports leagues suspended their operations and Disneyland closed down. News Hour anchor Judy Woodruff called it "a day like few others in modern American life."
With the nation gripped by confusion and anxiety, Trump declared a national emergency. Grocery store shelves were depleted of toilet paper, hand sanitizer and disinfectants.
At the end of the Friday News Hour that week, Judy Woodruff had reassuring words, and some gentle guidance, for viewers.
"This is a time for the lucky, healthy ones to think of others. Maybe there's an elderly couple who didn't get to the store as early as they wanted. Perhaps someone with a disability or a weakened immune system couldn't get there at all," she said.
"This is a moment for Americans to show our best qualities. We're going to work our way through this. Let's keep others, who may not be as strong and resilient as we are, in mind, too."
Correspondent Lisa Desjardins was the only reporter broadcasting live on television outside of lockdown in the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Hundreds of supporters of President Donald Trump broke into the Capitol building, entered congressional offices and destroyed property. Nearly 140 Capitol Police officers were wounded; Brian Sicknick suffered strokes and died hours after his exposure to a chemical irritant during the attack. Four officers from the Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department died by suicide in the days or months after the attack. One person was shot and killed by a police officer. All members of Congress were uninjured.
Desjardins and then-correspondent Amna Nawaz were both at the Capitol that day to cover the certification of Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election, as well as the rally of Trump supporters that devolved into violence. Outside on the lawn, where Nawaz and producers were stationed for live coverage, protesters called for the deaths of Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while others fought against law enforcement before breaking through a police line.
As the protesters stormed the Capitol, Desjardins narrated what was happening inside the building, recording video on her phone and interviewing a protester about his motivations and plans.
The News Hour won a Peabody Award for its coverage that day.
PBS News, in all its incarnations, has been the inspiration for New Yorker cartoons, Doonesbury comic strips, Saturday Night Live sketches and skits on Sesame Street. We've even had one news correspondent undergo a Muppet transformation.
Economics correspondent Paul Solman's doppelganger, "Bald Solman," was born after Stephen Colbert roasted a News Hour story on his show, The Colbert Report. The comedian poked fun of Solman and a Making $ense segment where he had interviewed Elmo and Grover about financial literacy and the marshmallow test.
In an online exclusive, Bald Solman fired back with his own retorts, teasing Colbert about his marshmallow consumption and warning he may turn into the villainous Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from "Ghostbusters."
Years later, when Colbert and wife Evie McGee Colbert sat down with Amna Nawaz for an interview in 2024, it was memories of family recipes for shrimp paste and cheese biscuits they shared, not s'mores.
Dan Cooney, Julia Griffin and Cecilia Lallmann contributed to this story.
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