Tom Brokaw

• Born: February 6, 1940
• Place of Birth: Webster, South Dakota

In 1982, Brokaw became the youngest person ever to anchor a national network evening news program. He went on to become one of the most respected television broadcasters of his time during a long career with NBC News.

Tom Brokaw was born in Webster, South Dakota, on February 6, 1941. He began a career in local television, and in 1966 joined NBC News. He built a diverse background in news coverage; covering civil rights violence in the South and becoming the NBC White House correspondent during the Watergate scandal. In 1976 he was made cohost, with Jane Pauley, of the popular NBC morning program, the Today show. He became known for his ability to function with a sometimes exceptional workload, most conspicuously when, while on the Today show, he also covered presidential primary elections and campaigns.

In 1982, Brokaw was offered a two-million-dollar contract to coanchor the NBC Nightly News with Roger Mudd. Brokaw would report from New York and Mudd from Washington. The previous anchor, John Chancellor, was to do occasional commentary. Chancellor and Mudd eventually dropped away, and Brokaw became the sole anchor on September 5, 1983. His style was easygoing and relaxed; he projected decency and a sense of humor, and he remained composed under stress. For many viewers, his charm was enhanced by a slight speech impediment. While his broadcast was rarely the top-rated news program during the early part of the decade, his Nielsen ratings rose after 1984.

Arguably, Brokaw’s most significant broadcast of the 1980s was his 1989 coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Wall had separated East and West Berlin since it was erected by Communist leaders in 1961. Already on assignment in Berlin, Brokaw was present when travel restrictions were lifted, and he reported on location as crowds of East Berliners poured over the former border and as a woman attacked the Wall itself with hammer and chisel.

In 1984, Brokaw prepared a documentary to correspond with the fortieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, France, during World War II. (This interest would lead, in 1998, to the publication of his first book, The Greatest Generation, a celebration of those Americans who survived the Great Depression and fought in World War II.) In 1986, Jay Barbree revealed the cause of the Challenger spacecraft disaster on Brokaw’s evening news program. During 1987, Brokaw interviewed both Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin and President Ronald Reagan in the White House. By the end of the decade, he had become the voice of NBC news and a trusted source of information for millions of people. In the last decade of the twentieth century his reporting remained acclaimed, as he earned the program a News and Documentary Emmy Award for his coverage of the devastating flood of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in 1993.

When two planes struck the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City as part of a coordinated terrorist attack on the morning of September 11, 2001, Brokaw immediately joined anchors Matt Lauer and Katie Couric on the Today show to begin almost a full day of coverage of the significant incident. He later explained that he found this event particularly difficult to report, and that he struggled to maintain his composure while working through the multitude of information that journalists were receiving as the chaotic day unfolded; he continued to appear on air for several hours over the subsequent days. Though he became the target of a letter containing anthrax soon after, he was unharmed; he emotionally expressed his frustration over the incident, which had affected his assistant, during broadcasts.

Not long after covering the sixtieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, Brokaw officially retired from anchoring the NBC Nightly News in late 2004, leaving the chair to Brian Williams. In the following years, he served as a correspondent for NBC, accepted the Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Broadcasting from Washington State University in 2006, hosted Meet the Press for a time in 2008, and wrote several books. After announcing that he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2013, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2014. Three years later, the National Museum of American History honored him with its Great Americans medal.

In January 2021 Brokaw announced his retirement from NBC after fifty-five years. His final piece for the network looked back at the tumultuous year of 2020, including the COVID-19 pandemic and President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. Brokaw stated he would continue to work on articles and books. In 2023, he published Never Give Up: A Prairie Family's Story, a memoir about the lives of his parents and grandparents in South Dakota.

Impact

Brokaw is considered one of the three major network news anchors of the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, along with Dan Rather for CBS and Peter Jennings for ABC. Of these three, Brokaw was probably least affected by the increasing corporate ownership of the networks. General Electric acquired NBC and its parent company, RCA, in 1986. As a result, NBC news suffered cuts and, like the other networks, saw an increasing emphasis on profit, as the corporate culture of the 1980s rejected the traditional model of networks’ news divisions as “loss leaders” (that is, divisions that would lose money but would build the prestige of their networks, contributing to their brand recognition and overall value). Brokaw benefited from this trend, however: He seemed less sophisticated and learned than Jennings, while he was cooler and more controlled than Rather. In the context of the drive to make news profitable, Brokaw’s youthful appearance and charm appealed to the kind of young, successful audience being sought by advertisers in the 1980s, auguring the future of American network news broadcasting.

Bibliography

Alan, Jeff, with James M. Lane. Anchoring America: The Changing Face of Network News. Bonus Books, 2003.

Bauder, David. "Tom Brokaw Says He's Retiring from NBC News After 55 Years." AP, 22 Jan. 2021, apnews.com/article/ronald-reagan-television-brian-williams-richard-nixon-journalism-b6a6f9dee555f378c2a54d089aeeffbb. Accessed 20 May 2024.

Brokaw, Tom. A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope. Random House, 2015.

Escobar, Natalie. "Tom Brokaw's Journey from Middle America to the World Stage." Smithsonian.com, 27 Sept. 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/tom-brokaws-journey-middle-america-world-stage-180965021/. Accessed 20 May 2024.

Fensch, Thomas, editor. Television News Anchors: An Anthology of Profiles of the Major Figures and Issues in United States Network Reporting. New Century Books, 2001.

Goldberg, Robert, and Gerald Jay Goldberg. Anchors: Brokaw, Jennings, Rather, and the Evening News. Carol, 1990.