Jim Lehrer of the 'MacNeil-Lehrer Report' dies at 85

[Steve Timko]

Jim Lehrer of the 'MacNeil-Lehrer Report' dies at 85

NEW YORK (AP) — Jim Lehrer, co-host and later host of the nightly PBS "NewsHour" that for decades offered a thoughtful take ...

Read the full story on https://apnews.com/f8aeb6fc3fc76ef11bca1d6368afb4f9

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[Kevin M.]

Amazing journalist. Horrible broadcaster, but an amazing journalist.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/remembering-jim-lehrer

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[Steve Timko]

I watched a couple of News Hours in September and it's a shell of the glory days. For one thing, the set looks like a converted community college classroom. It doesn't seem as informative as it used to be. But maybe in our information overload they no longer stand out.

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[PGage]

I’m not sure what you mean here by the current show not “Standing our” or what Kevin meant earlier by saying Lehrer was not a good broadcaster.

I agree Newshour is not as good as it was with Lehrer, but I think it still stands out head and shoulders above anything else on television. And while the obit quotes Lehrer as say he was not an entertainer (and maybe that is all Kevin means) I found Lehrer to be among the best ever television broadcasters of the news.

For my mother and father, the gold standard of TV news was first Chet Huntley, then Cronkite. I  grew up watching them as a kid. But for me the gold standard is Jim Lehrer.

He was not perfect; I thought he was slow and always incomplete in acknowledging and correcting the criticism that his show’s perspective was narrow (white, male and corporate). But he was fair, direct, modest and trustworthy. 

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[Kevin M.]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2020 at 3:19 PM PGage <pga...@gmail.com> wrote:

I’m not sure what you mean here by the current show not “Standing our” or what Kevin meant earlier by saying Lehrer was not a good broadcaster.

He did not have a clue about how to maintain audience interest. I’m not looking to be entertained when I watch the news, but there are ways broadcasters share information beyond dry readings and static images, and The News Hour avoided them all to such an extreme that it had to be a conscious choice. I still watched because nobody else on TV delivered “just the facts,” but — as I posted on someone else’s Facebook earlier — in college when I wanted information about what was going on, I watched MacNeil/Lehrer, but if I wanted to know why I ought to care about what was going on, I watched Peter Jennings. Now they are all gone, and there is nobody on TV who does what they did anymore. 

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Kevin M. (RPCV)

[PGage]

I actually always had the opposite reaction to those two. Jennings was fine, but his newscast was taken over by Roone Arledge, still also producing MNF and he brought all of his visual bells, whistles and gimmicks to news. I date the beginning of decline of TV News to that ABC show. Initially NBC and especially CBS made fun of the Jennings newscast, but as his ratings went up, they followed with gusto, and so began a race to the bottom. Jennings was not himself the lowest common denominator, but he led the steady March to it - though of course compared to what came later his show now seems sober.

And I always thought the Newshour excelled not just at reporting the facts, but at putting it in context and giving reasonable analysis - in short, explaining why the facts were important. 

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[Steve Timko]

I will watch it again. I watched it a couple of times while hospitalized in September and was disappointed. The discussion was superficial. The guests were routine talking heads and not the experts they used to attract. On a couple of packages the photography seemed amateurish. 

Part of the problem may be the nature of the guests. Back in the day the anchors seemed to be happy to step aside and let the guests parry and riposte. Both sides usually made excellent points. Now the standard on television is who screams the loudest.

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