Remembering 2024’s Losses: Robert MacNeil

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This year I’m saluting the people in the various walks of life who passed away in 2024 as well as the music individuals. For today’s entry, I present one of the great journalists of my time…probably of all time. Robert MacNeil, OC If you’ve ever watched the NBC coverage of JFK’s assassination, it is Robert MacNeil who makes Frank McGee wince when he tells that the assistant press secretary announced Kennedy’s death. It was a different era, and they didn’t have satellite trucks and cell phones. MacNeil was on the telephone to McGee, live on the air; and, as they couldn’t carry what MacNeil was saying, he relayed the information to McGee, who repeated it. (Oddly, right after MacNeil told McGee that JFK had died, the patch to the phone line started working and everyone could hear MacNeil’s voice.) Then there was the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, the landmark PBS television program that may (for better or worse) be considered the forerunner of 24-hour news channels. “Back then,” news was 30 minutes, but PBS realized that not all the news could fit into half an hour. Robert MacNeil was Canadian by birth, and a journalist by trade. He was one of the greats of a long-gone era of news reporting instead of “opinions-as-facts” yellow journalism (these things are cyclical). His passing leaves another gaping hole in the world of reporting the news for the sake of news. Robert MacNeil, OC Born Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil, January 19, 1931, Montreal, Quebec Died April 12, 2024, New York, New York (natural causes) (age 93) HALL OF FAME: Television Here’s MacNeil discussing, briefly, his actions while in JFK’s motorcade on November 22, 1963: