As PBS News turns 50, longtime viewers share what the show has meant to them

In a time before the omnipresent internet, Annie Feighery’s window to the world was the PBS News Hour — by a slightly different name.

In her small, rural New Mexico town, Feighery’s high school civics teacher, Dave Berggren, assigned The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour as essential viewing every Friday. He especially wanted his students to focus on the commentary portion of the program that gave space to two different viewpoints on the week’s biggest news.

The show known today as the News Hour turns 50 years old this week. To mark our anniversary, PBS News spoke with people who have been longtime viewers to hear how the show, and later its work online and across social media, has helped shape their lives.

For Feighery, that “exposure to the outside world and seeing that understanding of our government and politics, it was a big influence on my life.”

Annie Feighery (top row, right) and the groups of students from her New Mexico high school chosen for a 1993 class trip to Washington, D.C., in this photo taken by Berggren, who died in 2022. Photo by Dave Berggren via Facebook

She and a handful of other students were selected for a school trip to Washington, D.C., during the first inauguration of former President Bill Clinton — a milestone that further cemented her curiosity about politics and how government works.

“A lot of amazing things happened that came together to seal an interest in government as a big part of my life and it started with the broader understanding of just the News Hour,” said Feighery, now the head of an organization that works in international humanitarian aid.

To this day, she doesn’t miss the Friday political wrap.

When Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer teamed up to cover the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, the gavel-to-gavel coverage “convinced a lot of people that public television could do news and public affairs honorably and fairly and responsibly,” the late MacNeil said. The first incarnation of the show, The Robert MacNeil Report, debuted in October 1975.

In the past five decades, the News Hour team has covered the biggest stories and interviewed leaders around the world. Here’s a major moment from every year we’ve been on air. Video by Julia Griffin and Timothy McPhillips/PBS News

Gary Dixon, who has watched the program since the beginning, wrote that the program emerged at a time when local and network news was bending toward entertainment.

General coverage of the Nixon impeachment proceedings and NASA missions had “whet everyone’s appetite of real news coverage,” Dixon wrote. “But real, consistently good new coverage on a national level was hard to find.”

As the show’s founders once put it, the News Hour stood out in the very different TV landscape decades ago, when there were only a handful of channels available. As cable news became more central to American politics, the field got more crowded.

“I came of age during the advent of cable news,” Feighery said, “and so, while news was changing so much around me and the way people consume news and the news has been marketed as a consumer good, it felt like the News Hour remained a safe way to get news that wasn’t a product.”

That’s not to say that the PBS News Hour hasn’t changed over the decades. (For one, there’s now a space in between “News” and “Hour.”)

Co-anchors Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Photo by Abbey Oldham

When Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff took over the anchor desk in 2013, becoming the first woman co-anchor team of a nightly news network television broadcast, it was a meaningful change for longtime fan Susan Fitzpatrick.

“The News Hour, as it went along, seemed to gain more confidence with each year that went by,” she said.

As Ifill and Woodruff launched a new era, the show also debuted a new look. Yet they assured viewers that any changes wouldn’t steer the program away from its mission.

“We have a new look, but Judy and I will bring you the news and analysis you’ve come to trust,” Ifill said.

Fans didn’t always embrace the changes. A new take on our theme song in 2015, featuring more prominent horns, prompted months and months of frustrated emails from viewers who shared their distaste for the new sound. They found it too loud. Too distracting. Too crude.

One viewer wrote that it had not been necessary to change the familiar tune, which they described as “a decadesold friend.”

“Ugh,” added Charlie Harmon, a musician, to the outpouring of colorful feedback.

“It’s even worse than what airlines force one to listen to before takeoff,” he wrote at the time.

Ten years later, Harmon remains a loyal watcher. His earliest memories of the News Hour were finding the time to catch the program in the early 1980s while working as an assistant, and later an archivist, for the famed composer Leonard Bernstein.

Harmon didn’t own a TV then. There was simply no time for it. But he made an exception for the News Hour. He’d go to the Bernstein’s personal library inside his Dakota apartment in New York to watch The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, then a 30-minute program.

Harmon doesn’t own a TV today, but he watches segments online.

And yes, he’s gotten used to the theme song, which hasn’t changed in the last 10 years. But he does mute or turn the volume down until the anchors start speaking.

How every anchor has opened the PBS News Hour in the last 50 years. Video by Cecilia Lallmann/PBS News

Scott Wilson’s introduction to the program came from his aunt and uncle, “hardcore political junkies.” While his parents traveled a lot in the 1970s, his relatives would come to stay with him.

“It was cool because our whole family got our political education from that branch of the family,” Wilson recalled, adding that it was his aunt in particular who made sure that “we saw all sides of the story and that we questioned what was being said and and we paid attention to what was happening.”

“You couldn’t wash dishes or anything [while the show was on]. You had to watch MacNeil/Lehrer,” he said.

The Trump administration rescinded federal public media funding in a request approved by Congress in July. The move led to the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helped to support thousands of stations across the nation, as well as NPR, PBS and national programs like the News Hour.

Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil meet with colleagues Judy Woodruff and Charlayne Hunter-Gault in this undated photo. Photo from the News Hour archives

Fitzpatrick said that MacNeil and Lehrer’s coverage during the Watergate hearings in her final year of high school “woke me up to what the government looked like.”

Reading lawmakers’ names in the newspaper was one thing. To actually see them in a congressional hearing was another, she said. It occurred to her that she was looking at a room full of mostly white men.

“Where are the women?” she recalled noting at the time.

“Public broadcasting is a gem,” Fitzpatrick said, and it has offered, “at least in my life, the opportunities to see and experience so many different things.”

Having watched the News Hour for the last 50 years, she hopes it’s still around long after she’s gone.

PBS News’ Daniel Cooney contributed to this report.