After 14 years of going solo at the PBS anchor desk, Jim Lehrer is expected to announce Tuesday at a programming conference in Baltimore that The NewsHour wth Jim Lehrer will return to a co-anchor format in the fall.
Lehrer, who will turn 75 on May 19, will be joined at the anchor desk by a rotating cast of correspondents including Gwen Ifill, Judy Woodruff and Jeffrey Brown.
The dean of network anchormen underwent a heart valve procedure last year that kept him away from the show for several months. But Lehrer told the Sun he was in excellent health and felt fit as ever as he prepared to moderate a presidential debate last fall. And while he has occasionally been absent from the anchor desk of The NewsHour during the last year, he has been a strong on-air presence through the election and the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
PBS and Lehrer are expected to present the change to public TV programmers and producers from across the country gathered in Baltimore as part of a larger re-tooling aimed at making the long-running newscast more compatible with the digital age. Part of that, sources at the convention said yesterday, will include a new set and anchor desk for the show, which draws about 1.5 million viewers a night. The show is also expected to re-titled and will not include Lehrer's name.
Just as Children's Television Workshop owns Sesame Street, Robert MacNeil and Lehrer own The NewsHour, which means they control underwriting and content on the show.
Lehrer's national anchor desk career started in 1976 when MacNeil, host of the PBS show, The Robert MacNeil Report, asked Lehrer to co-anchor from Washington. MacNeil was based in New York.
The co-anchored program debuted as the MacNeil-Lehrer Report. In 1983, the half-hour newscast expanded to an hour making it the only hour of nightly news on national broadcast TV to this day. MacNeil retired from the broadcast in 1995 leaving Lehrer to fly solo.
The NewsHour has just come through a rocky year, which saw it drop down to one underwriter. Strapped for funds, the MacNeil-Lehrer production company froze all salaries and stopped making contributions to 401K plans, according to executive producer Linda Winslow.
But a recent underwriting commitment from Intel has helped turn the tide, and Winslow says the news operation is finding its footing once again.
"We're not fat and sassy, but we're hanging in there." She told the Sun in a telephone interview last week.
More than any other TV journalist, Lehrer, a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, has come to represent the notion of a free press working to serve citizens.
"I have an old fashioned notion that news is not a commodity," he told the Sun. "What the founders did was create a society that was dependent – dependent – on public involvement. And the only way the public can have the information it needs to get involved is with our help. That's our Constitutional mission – those of us who signed on as journalists – to provide that information. And there is no other mission involved."
Lehrer came to PBS in 1972 from public TV station KERA in Dallas. He had previously been a reporter and city editor for the Dallas Time-Herald.
(Above: PBS Photo of Jim Lehrer)
