Caravan era The first regularly scheduled American television newscast in history was made by NBC News on February 21, 1940, anchored by
Lowell Thomas (1892–1981), and airing weeknights at 6:45 pm. In June 1940, NBC, through its flagship station in New York City, W2XBS (renamed commercial WNBT in 1941, now
WNBC) 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 (now
WRGB), 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 (
WNBC) and reportedly fed to WPTZ (now
KYW-TV) 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 (roughly 5000) 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 1955, the
Camel News Caravan fell behind CBS'
Douglas Edwards with the News, and Swayze lost the already tepid support of NBC executives.
Huntley-Brinkley era transatlantic film cable. , one of the network's first anchors 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. 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. and prompted a prominent U.S. senator to observe later, "When I think of Little Rock, I think of John Chancellor." 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. (Studio 8H had been home to the
NBC Symphony Orchestra and is now the home of
Saturday Night Live.) 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.
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 (Brinkley, McGee, and Chancellor) 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. 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' (GM) 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.
2007–2014 During the
Great Recession, NBC Universal urged NBC News to save $500 million. On that occasion, NBC News laid off several of its in-house reporters, such as
Kevin Corke, Jeannie Ohm, and Don Teague. This was the largest layoff in NBC News history. After the sudden death of the influential moderator
Tim Russert of
Meet the Press in June 2008,
Tom Brokaw took over as an interim host; and on December 14, 2008,
David Gregory became the new moderator of the show until August 14, 2014, when NBC announced that NBC News Political Director
Chuck Todd would take over as the 12th moderator of
Meet the Press starting September 7, 2014. Gregory's last broadcast was on August 10, 2014. By 2009, NBC had established leadership in network news, airing the highest-rated morning, evening, and Sunday interview news programs. Its ability to share costs with MSNBC and share in the cable network's advertising and subscriber revenue made it far more profitable than its network rivals. On March 27, 2012, NBC News broadcast an edited segment from a 911 call placed by
George Zimmerman before he
shot Trayvon Martin. The editing made it appear that Zimmerman volunteered that Martin was black, rather than merely responding to the dispatcher's inquiry, which would support a view that the shooting was racially motivated. A media watchdog organization accused NBC News of engaging in "an all-out falsehood." While NBC News initially declined to comment, the news agency did issue an apology to viewers.
The Washington Post called the statement "skimpy on the details on just how the mistake unfolded." Engel's account was however challenged from early on. In April 2015, NBC had to revise the kidnapping account, following further investigations by
The New York Times, which suggested that the NBC team "was almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the
Free Syrian Army," rather than by a loyalist
Shia group. In 2013, John Lapinski was Director of Elections, replacing Sheldon Gawiser. In 2015, the election team's
decision desk group was given its first permanent space at 30 Rockefeller, replacing the News Sales Archives that had occupied the space previously.
2015–2018 In February 2015, NBC suspended Brian Williams for six months for telling an inaccurate story about his experience in the
2003 invasion of Iraq. He was replaced by
Lester Holt on an interim basis. In March 2015, amid the firing and declining ratings, Andrew Lack rejoined NBC News as a chairman for the division and MSNBC. On June 18, 2015, it was announced that Holt would become the permanent anchor of the
Nightly News, and Williams would be moved to MSNBC as an anchor of breaking news and special reports beginning in August. MSNBC's ratings subsequently improved in the first quarter of 2016, with daytime viewership up by more than 100%.
Today became the first-place morning news show, surpassing
Good Morning America in total viewers as of March 31, 2016, following a six-month lead among 25–54-year-olds. NBC News was the first news team to possess the
tape of Donald Trump recorded by the NBCUniversal-produced entertainment news show
Access Hollywood, after a producer had made NBC News aware of it. The division nternally debated publishing it for three days, and then an unidentified source gave a copy of the tape to
The Washington Post Reporter
David Fahrenthold, who contacted NBC for comment, notified the Trump campaign that he had the video, obtained confirmation of its authenticity, and released a story and the tape itself, scooping NBC. Alerted that the
Post might release the story immediately, In January 2017, NBC News hired former
Fox News personality
Megyn Kelly to a "triple role", which would include becoming a correspondent for major news events and election coverage, hosting a Sunday-night
newsmagazine, as well as hosting a daytime talk show. The newsmagazine
Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly premiered in June 2017, while the daytime talk show
Megyn Kelly Today premiered in September 2017. In late-October 2018, Kelly attracted criticism for a segment on
Megyn Kelly Today in which she defended the use of
blackface in
Halloween costumes; amid the controversy and poor ratings, NBC cancelled
Megyn Kelly Today shortly afterward, and Kelly left NBC News in January 2019.
Sexual misconduct and NBC News in 2012 On November 29, 2017, NBC News announced that
Matt Lauer's employment had been terminated after an unidentified female NBC employee reported that Lauer had sexually harassed her during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and that the harassment continued after they returned to New York. NBC News management said it had been aware that
The New York Times and
Variety had been conducting independent investigations of Lauer's behavior, but that management had been unaware of previous allegations against Lauer. Linda Vester, a former NBC News correspondent, disputed the claims that management knew nothing, saying that "everybody knew" that Lauer was dangerous. According to
Ronan Farrow, multiple sources have stated that NBC News was not only aware of Lauer's misconduct beforehand, but that Harvey Weinstein used this knowledge to pressure them into killing a story that would have outed his own sexual misconduct.
Variety reported allegations by at least ten of Lauer's current and former colleagues. Additional accusations went public in the ensuing days. NBC News President
Noah Oppenheim suggested an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct by
Harvey Weinstein after NBC contributor
Ronan Farrow pitched a general idea to report on sexual harassment in Hollywood. After a 10-month investigation by Farrow and NBC Producer Rich McHugh, NBC chose not to publish it. The story, with very few changes, was published a few weeks later in the
New Yorker Magazine instead. A story on the subject of Weinstein's alleged behavior also appeared several days earlier in
The New York Times. Following criticism for missing a major story it had initiated, NBC News defended the decision, saying that at the time Farrow was at NBC, the early reporting still had important missing necessary elements. Farrow later disputed this characterization, saying that he had multiple named accusers willing to come forward and that the version ultimately published in the
New Yorker had very few changes from the version that NBC News rejected. A former NBC News executive has said that the story on Weinstein was killed because NBC News was aware of the sexual misconduct by Lauer; in
Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Ronan Farrow cites two sources within
American Media, Inc. stating that the story was killed in response to an overt threat from Weinstein to out Lauer.
2018–present In October 2018, NBC News announced that it would soft launch a new
free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channel, initially named "NBC News Signal". The service officially launched on May 29, 2019, as
NBC News Now. In May 2020, Lack departed from NBC News and left NBCUniversal, amid a reorganization being undertaken by new CEO
Jeff Shell; NBC News, CNBC, and MSNBC were placed under the supervision of
Cesar Conde as chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group. Under Conde, NBC News began efforts to incorporate more diverse viewpoints—including from conservative perspectives—in its output outside of MSNBC (including
Meet the Press), to alleviate concerns from its affiliate body that the left-leaning positioning of MSNBC reflected upon the division as a whole. These moves coincided with MSNBC's own changes in leadership, which resulted in a gradual increase in opinion programming, and as a result, a gradual decrease in talent sharing with the remainder of NBC News (with some personalities beginning to prioritize contributions to NBC News Now instead of MSNBC). After NBC hired her during her interview on
Meet the Press with
Kristen Welker, McDaniel backtracked on her claims, saying that Biden won the 2020 election "fair and square" and condemned political violence. After two days of on-air protests by former
Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd and various MSNBC commentators (including
Rachel Maddow,
Mika Brzezinski,
Joe Scarborough and
Nicolle Wallace), NBC News announced on March 26, 2024, that the network would not hire McDaniel. In November 2024, parent company
Comcast announced that NBCUniversal would divest most of its cable networks to a new company controlled by its shareholders, later named
Versant. The spin-off will include CNBC and MSNBC. In October 2025, ahead of the Versant spin-off, CNBC and MSNBC began to separate their operations from NBC News, with the latter having expanded its in-house newsgathering resources throughout the year, and rebranded as
MS NOW on November 15, 2025. Meanwhile, NBC News laid off approximately 150 employees to reduce redundancies. The layoffs dismantled the dedicated journalism teams producing the NBC News digital verticals NBC Asian America, NBC BLK (African Americans), NBC Latino, and
NBC Out (LGBTQ+); it was reported that the four verticals would continue to operate, but using the resources of the overall NBC News staff. MS NOW would hire several NBC News reporters such as
Ken Dilanian,
Vaughn Hillyard, and
Brandy Zadrozny, while
Steve Kornacki left MS NOW to pursue an analytics role at NBC News and
NBC Sports. ==Presidents==