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NBC News
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NBC News is the news division of American television network NBC. Its current president is Steve Capus. It is the top-rated broadcast news division and has been for a decade.
The network was long known as "America's News Leader" but in the fall of 2006 the network also started using the slogan "Wherever You Go, There We Are." This slogan promotes its television, cable, radio, Internet and mobile device outreaches. Even though they use "Wherever You Go...", they continue using the "America's News Leader" slogan as well.
Contents |
- Early Today
- Today
- Weekend Today
- Meet the Press with Tim Russert
- NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams
- NBC Nightly News Weekend Edition
- Dateline NBC
- The Chris Matthews Show
- Your Total Health
NBC News provides content for the Internet, as well as cable-only news networks CNBC and MSNBC.
Additionally, NBC News broadcasts radio news bulletins at the top of the hour, distributed by Westwood One, a radio service owned by NBC's competitor, CBS. Listen to the latest headline bulletin by clicking here (subject to availability).
In 1982, NBC News began production on NBC News Overnight with anchors Linda Ellerbee, Lloyd Dobyns, and Bill Schechner. That program was cancelled in December 1983, but in 1991, NBC News aired another overnight news show called NBC Nightside, which originated from Charlotte, North Carolina. The four-plus hour show was anchored by Kim Hindrew, Tom Donavan, and Tom Miller. Kim Hindrew left for WMC in Memphis and was replaced by Tonya Strong. NBC Nightside lasted until 1999.
NBC News Channel is a news video and report feed service, similar to a wire service, providing pre-produced national and regional stories with fronting reporters customized for NBC network affiliates. It is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Although the operations of CBS News have received more attention from historians of broadcast journalism, NBC's operations often even received higher ratings. From 1956 through 1970, the television broadcast team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley consistently exceeded the viewership levels attained by CBS News and its main anchor Walter Cronkite. The pair, together with fellow correspondents Frank McGee and Jay Barbree, distinguished itself in the coverage of American manned space missions in the Project Mercury, Project Gemini and Project Apollo programs, during an era when space missions rated continuous coverage. (An entire studio, Studio 8H, was configured for this coverage, complete with 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 is now the home of the NBC entertainment program Saturday Night Live.) The dominance ended when Huntley retired. (Huntley died of cancer in 1974.) The loss of Huntley, along with a reluctance of RCA to fund NBC News at the level CBS was funding CBS News, left NBC News in the doldrums. NBC News did not recover viewership levels until after General Electric acquired RCA.
NBC News got the first American news interviews from two Russian presidents (Putin, Gorbachev), and Brokaw was the only American TV news correspondent to witness of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In the second Iraq war, NBC News and main anchor Tom Brokaw covered the war like no other television company, in part owning to the willingness of GE to fund it. NBC Newsman David Bloom pushed through the GE and U.S. Department of Defense bureaucracies permission to construct a mobile news vehicle that could transmit live video broadcasts from the battlefield. The "Bloom-mobile" brought satellite images and videos (clear, detailed) into homes across America and Europe, live and one-on-one. Bloom did not live to accept the accolades after the armed conflict; he died of natural causes unrelated to combat during the final phase of the fighting.
NBC News also benefits from the GE corporate structure by having the ability to take reports from its cable counterpart MSNBC.
In 1993, Dateline NBC broadcast an investigative report about the safety of General Motors (GM) trucks. GM discovered the "actual footage" utilized in the broadcast had been rigged by the inclusion of explosive incendiaries attached to the gas tanks and the use of improper sealants for those tanks. GM subsequently filed an anti-defamation lawsuit against NBC. NBC publicly admitted the results of the tests were rigged and settled the lawsuit with GM. As a result of the controversy, several Dateline producers were fired.
NBC's primary news show is NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Williams assumed anchor duties in December, 2004 upon the retirement of his predecessor, Tom Brokaw.
NBC Nightly News is shown on CNBC Europe. MSNBC is not shown outside the Americas on a channel in its own right. However, both NBC News and MSNBC are shown for a few hours a day on Orbit News in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. MSNBC is also shown occasionally on sister network CNBC Europe during breaking news.
The theme music for most of NBC's news television programs use the composure "The Mission," by John Williams, for its theme song. The song has five parts to it and was first used by NBC in 1985.