Background
By 1956, NBC executives had grown dissatisfied with John Cameron Swayze in his role anchoring the network's evening news program, which fell behind its main competition, CBS's Douglas Edwards with the News, in 1955.[4] Network executive Ben Park suggested replacing Swayze with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who had garnered favorable attention anchoring NBC's coverage of the national political conventions that summer.[5] Bill McAndrew, NBC's director of news (later NBC News president), had seen a highly rated local news program on NBC affiliate WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia, with an anchor in Huntington, along with a second anchor in the state capital of Charleston, a format which continues on WSAZ-TV today.[6] He replaced Camel News Caravan with the Huntley-Brinkley Report, which premiered on October 29, 1956, with Huntley in New York and Brinkley in Washington. Producer Reuven Frank, who had advocated pairing Huntley and Brinkley for the convention coverage, thought using two anchors on a regular news program "was one of the dumber ideas I had ever heard."[5]
Huntley handled the bulk of the news most nights, with Brinkley specializing in Washington-area topics such as the White House, U.S. Congress, and the Pentagon. (When one was on vacation the other would typically handle the full broadcast alone, leaving viewers with a familiar anchor instead of a little-known substitute such as a field reporter.) The closing credits music for the broadcast was the second movement (scherzo) of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, from the 1952 studio recording with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Enter Texaco
Initially, the program lost audience from Swayze's program, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower let it be known that he was displeased by the switch.[7] In the summer of 1957, the program had no advertisers.[7] As its content improved, though, it began attracting critical praise and a larger audience, and by 1958, it had pulled even with CBS's program.[7] The program received a big boost when, in June 1958, Texaco began purchasing all of its advertising, an arrangement that continued for three years.[8]
Critical reception
Critics considered Huntley to possess one of the best broadcast voices ever heard, and Brinkley's dry, often witty, newswriting presented viewers a contrast to the often sober output from CBS News. The program received a Peabody Award in 1958 for "Outstanding Achievement in News," the awards committee noting that the anchors had "developed a mature and intelligent treatment of the news that has become a welcome and refreshing institution for millions of viewers."[9] The program received the award again two years later in the same category, the committee concluding that Huntley and Brinkley had "dominated the news division of television so completely in the past year that it would be unthinkable to present a Peabody Award in that category to anybody else." [10] By that time, the program had surpassed CBS's evening news program, Douglas Edwards with the News, in ratings and maintained higher viewership levels for much of the 1960s, even after Walter Cronkite took over CBS's competing program (initially named Walter Cronkite with the News on April 16, 1962 and renamed the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963). It received eight Emmy Awards in its 14-year run.
Huntley and Brinkley conveyed a strong chemistry, and a survey for NBC later found that viewers liked that the anchors talked to each other. In fact, aside from their sign-off, Huntley and Brinkley's only communication came when one anchor finished a story and handed off to the other by saying the other's name, a signal to an AT&T technician to switch the long-distance transmission lines from New York to Washington or vice versa.[11]
Ratings
By 1965, the program brought in more advertising revenue than any other on television.[14] On November 15 of that year, The Huntley–Brinkley Report became the first weekday network evening news program broadcast in color. The network's weekend programs, Saturday's Scherer-MacNeil Report and Sunday's Frank McGee Report, were also broadcast in color at that time.
The program's ratings slipped late in the decade as CBS's Walter Cronkite gained fame for his coverage of the space program, a field in which neither Huntley nor Brinkley had much interest (although Huntley and Brinkley occasionally participated in space coverage, another NBC newsman, Frank McGee, was the prime anchor of NBC's space coverage). Some contemporary observers at NBC felt the program began to slip after a 1967 strike by members of AFTRA. Brinkley honored the picket lines but Huntley, who viewed himself as "a newsman, not a performer" did not, remaining at the anchor desk. This split puzzled viewers, who had come to admire them for their teamwork. Unbeknownst to most viewers, that relationship was fairly limited—Huntley and Brinkley operated from different cities and rarely met in person, except for live coverage of political conventions, election nights, or a few other events.
Saturday evening broadcasts
For most of its run, The Huntley–Brinkley Report aired only Monday through Friday, but in January 1969, the network expanded it to Saturday evenings, with Huntley and Brinkley working solo on alternating weeks, although sometimes, the other would be seen in a taped essay or commentary recorded on Friday. On July 19, 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, both co-anchored live (Huntley and Brinkley were commentators during NBC's coverage of the historic Moon landing, again with McGee as anchor). After the Saturday edition failed to garner sufficient ratings to justify two anchors, veteran correspondent Frank McGee took over as anchor, with Sander Vanocur substituting, although the broadcast kept the HBR name. The Frank McGee Report, a documentary program not tied to the day's news, aired on Sundays in the time slot.
On February 16, 1970, NBC announced that Huntley would retire later that year. Huntley and Brinkley concluded their final newscast together on July 31, 1970.
Upon Huntley's retirement, the network renamed the program the NBC Nightly News. Huntley died in 1974. Brinkley worked as co-anchor or commentator on Nightly News until 1981 when he departed for ABC News and its new weekly Sunday morning news program This Week. He died in 2003.
