NBC News
NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. It operates under the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of NBCUniversal, which itself is a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's various operations report to the president of NBC News, Rebecca Blumenstein. The NBCUniversal News Group also comprises the Spanish language Noticias Telemundo and United Kingdom-based Sky News. It formerly included MSNBC, the network's 24-hour liberal cable news channel, as well as business and consumer news channels CNBC and CNBC World before their split in 2025 as part of a larger split from NBCUniversal into Versant.
NBC News aired the first regularly scheduled news program in American broadcast television history on February 21, 1940. The group's broadcasts are produced and aired from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBCU's headquarters in New York City. The division presides over the flagship evening newscast, NBC Nightly News; the world's first of its genre morning television program, Today; and the longest-running American television series, Meet the Press, a Sunday morning newsmaker interview program. NBC News also offers 70 years of rare historic footage from the NBCUniversal Archives online. NBC News operates NBCNews.com, the division's official website.
History
Caravan era
The first regularly scheduled American television newscast in history was made by NBC News on February 21, 1940, anchored by Lowell Thomas, and airing weeknights at 6:45 pm. In June 1940, NBC, through its flagship station in New York City, W2XBS operating on channel one, televised 30.25 hours of coverage of the Republican National Convention live and direct from Philadelphia. The station used a series of relays from Philadelphia to New York, for rebroadcast on W2XB in Schenectady, making this among the first "network" programs of NBC Television. Due to wartime and technical restrictions, there were no live telecasts of the 1944 conventions, although films of the events were reportedly shown over WNBT the next day.About this time, there were irregularly scheduled, quasi-network newscasts originating from NBC's WNBT in New York City and reportedly fed to WPTZ in Philadelphia and WRGB in Schenectady, NY. For example, Esso sponsored news features as well as The War As It Happens in the final days of World War II, another irregularly scheduled NBC television newsreel program that was also seen in New York, Philadelphia, and Schenectady on the relatively few television sets which existed at the time. After the war, NBC Television Newsreel aired filmed news highlights with narration. Later in 1948, when sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, NBC Television Newsreel was renamed Camel Newsreel Theatre and then, when John Cameron Swayze was added as an on-camera anchor in 1949, the program was renamed Camel News Caravan.
In 1948, NBC teamed up with Life magazine to provide election night coverage of President Harry S. Truman's surprising victory over New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. The television audience was small, but NBC's share in New York was double that of any other outlet. The following year, the Camel News Caravan, anchored by Swayze, debuted on NBC. Lacking the graphics and technology of later years, it contained many elements of modern newscasts. NBC hired its own film crews and in the program's early years, it dominated one of its competitors, CBS, which did not hire its own film crews until 1953. In 1950, David Brinkley began serving as the program's Washington correspondent, but attracted little attention until paired with Chet Huntley in 1956. In 1955, the Camel News Caravan fell behind CBS' Douglas Edwards with the News, and Swayze lost the already tepid support of NBC executives. The following year, NBC replaced the program with the Huntley-Brinkley Report.
Beginning in 1951, NBC News was managed by Director of News Bill McAndrew, who reported to Vice President of News and Public Affairs J. Davidson Taylor.
Huntley-Brinkley era
Television assumed an increasingly prominent role in American family life in the late 1950s, and NBC News was called television's "champion of news coverage." NBC president Robert Kintner provided the news division with ample amounts of both financial resources and air time. In 1956, the network paired anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and the two became celebrities, supported by reporters including John Chancellor, Frank McGee, Edwin Newman, Sander Vanocur, Nancy Dickerson, Tom Pettit, and Ray Scherer.Created by Producer Reuven Frank, NBC's The Huntley–Brinkley Report had its debut on October 29, 1956. During much of its 14-year run, it exceeded the viewership levels of its CBS News competition, anchored initially by Douglas Edwards and, beginning in April 1962, Walter Cronkite.
NBC's Vice President Of News And Public Affairs, J. Davidson Taylor, was a Southerner who, with Producer Reuven Frank, was determined that NBC would lead television's coverage of the civil rights movement. In 1955, NBC provided national coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, airing reports from Frank McGee, then News Director of NBC's Montgomery affiliate WSFA-TV, who would later join the network. A year later, John Chancellor's coverage of the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was the first occasion when the key news story came from television rather than print and prompted a prominent U.S. senator to observe later, "When I think of Little Rock, I think of John Chancellor." Other reporters who covered the movement for the network included Sander Vanocur, Herbert Kaplow, Charles Quinn, and Richard Valeriani, who was hit with an ax handle at a demonstration in Marion, Alabama in 1965.
While Walter Cronkite's enthusiasm for the space race eventually won the anchorman viewers for CBS and NBC News, with the work of correspondents such as Frank McGee, Roy Neal, Jay Barbree, and Peter Hackes providing ample coverage of American-crewed space missions in the Project Mercury, Project Gemini, and Project Apollo programs. In an era when space missions rated continuous coverage, NBC configured its largest studio, Studio 8H, for space coverage. It used 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. NBC's coverage of the first Moon landing in 1969 earned the network an Emmy Award.
In the late 1950s, Kintner reorganized the chain of command at the network, making Bill McAndrew president of NBC News, reporting directly to Kintner. McAndrew served in that position until his death in 1968. McAndrew was succeeded by his Executive Vice President, Producer Reuven Frank, who held the position until 1973.
On November 22, 1963, NBC interrupted various programs on its affiliate stations at 1:45 p.m... to announce that President John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas. Eight minutes later, at 1:53:12 p.m......, NBC broke into programming with a network bumper slide and Chet Huntley, Bill Ryan and Frank McGee informing the viewers what was going on as it happened. Still, the reports were audio-only since a camera was not in service. However, NBC did not begin broadcasting over the air until 1:57 pm. ET. About 40 minutes later, after word came that JFK was pronounced dead, NBC suspended regular programming and carried 71 hours of uninterrupted news coverage of the assassination and the funeral of the president—including the only live broadcast of the fatal shooting of Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Jack Ruby as Oswald was being led in handcuffs by law-enforcement officials through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters.
''NBC Nightly News'' era
NBC's ratings lead began to slip toward the end of the 1960s and fell sharply when Huntley retired in 1970; he died of cancer four years later, in 1974. The loss of Huntley and RCA's reluctance to fund NBC News at a similar level as CBS's funding of its news division left NBC News in the doldrums. NBC's primary news show gained its present title, NBC Nightly News, on August 3, 1970.The network tried a platoon of anchors during the early months of Nightly News. Despite the efforts of the network's eventual lead anchor, the articulate, even-toned Chancellor, and an occasional first-place finish in the Nielsens, Nightly News in the 1970s was primarily a strong second. By the end of the decade, NBC had to contend not only with a powerful CBS but also a surging ABC, led by Roone Arledge. Tom Brokaw became sole anchor in 1983, after co-anchoring with Roger Mudd for a year, and began leading NBC's efforts. In 1986 and 1987, NBC won the top spot in the Nielsens for the first time in years, only to fall back when Nielsen's rating methodology changed. In late 1996, Nightly News again moved into first place, a spot it has held onto in most of the succeeding years. Brian Williams assumed primary anchor duties when Brokaw retired in December 2004.
In 1993, Dateline NBC broadcast an investigative report about the safety of General Motors' trucks. GM discovered the "actual footage" used in the broadcast had been rigged by including explosive incendiaries attached to the gas tanks and improper sealants for those tanks. GM subsequently filed an anti-defamation lawsuit against NBC, which publicly admitted the results of the tests were rigged and settled the lawsuit with GM on the very same day.
In November 1995, NBC News signed an agreement with German public broadcaster ZDF to share newsgathering resources. The agreement enabled NBC News to move its Frankfurt bureau to ZDF's headquarters in Mainz.
On October 22, 2007, Nightly News moved into its new high-definition studio, Studio 3C, at NBC Studios in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City. The network's 24-hour cable network, MSNBC, also joined the network in New York on that day. The new studios–headquarters for NBC News and MSNBC were now located in one area.