Founding anchor of 'PBS NewsHour' dies

Sadly, Robert MacNeil, the man famous for creating NewsHour on PBS, has passed away.

He co-anchored The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour with his late partner, Jim Lehrer, for years.

His daughter, Alison MacNeil, said that her father passed away because of natural causes at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

MacNeil first came onto the scene with the half-hour Robert MacNeil Report on PBS in 1975 with his friend Lehrer as Washington correspondent.

The broadcast would become the MacNeil-Lehrer Report before being expanded to an hour in 1983 and renamed "MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour."

America's first one-hour evening news broadcast remains on the air today with Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz currently serving as anchors.

MacNeil had previously said why he thought his program was able to be successful for so many years:

"We don’t need to SELL the news," he claimed. "The networks hype the news to make it seem vital, important. What’s missing (in 22 minutes) is context, sometimes balance, and a consideration of questions that are raised by certain events."