NBC Nightly News (titled as NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas for its weeknight broadcasts ) is the flagship daily evening television news program for NBC News, the news division of the NBC television network in the United States. First aired on August 3, 1970, the program is currently the second most-watched network newscast in the United States, behind ABC's World News Tonight. NBC Nightly News is produced from Studio 3A at NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Center in New York City. Selected Los Angeles–based editions broadcast from The Brokaw News Center in Universal City, California, or when broadcasting from Washington, D.C., either from the NBC News bureau based at WRC-TV in the Tenleytown neighborhood, or NBC's secondary studio overlooking Capitol Hill.
, the broadcast is anchored by Tom Llamas on weeknights, José Díaz-Balart on Saturday since 2016 and Hallie Jackson on Sunday since 2024. Previous anchors include John Chancellor, David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, and Lester Holt.
The program is broadcast live over most NBC stations from 6:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time seven days a week; the "Western Edition" of the program occasionally features breaking news and/or updated information on news stories covered during the original telecast for Pacific Time Zone viewers, and some stations in that time zone carry it live at 3:30 p.m. PT to lead into their late afternoon local news blocks. Its current theme music, "The Mission", debuted in 1985 and was composed by John Williams.
History
John Chancellor and David Brinkley (1970–1982)
NBC Nightly News replaced The Huntley–Brinkley Report on August 3, 1970, upon Chet Huntley's retirement. At first, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, and Frank McGee rotated duties as anchors. At least one, usually two, and very rarely all three anchored the program on a given night. Except for the few nights when one of the men solo anchored, each evening's program included one anchor based in New York City at the Rockefeller Center and one in Washington, D.C., as had been the case on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. Brinkley's appearances were always from Washington and McGee's were always from New York. Chancellor moved between those two cities depending on his partner for the evening.
In addition to Brinkley as a holdover from the Huntley-Brinkley Report, McGee had received praise for his anchoring or co-anchoring of space flights, and Chancellor had also received praise as McGee's co-anchor for the space missions of Apollo 12 and Apollo 13.
With network executives perceiving the instability of this arrangement as a factor in Nightly News losing audience share to the CBS Evening News, NBC discontinued the rotation arrangement, and McGee eventually replaced Hugh Downs as host of Today. Chancellor became the sole anchor of the program on August 9, 1971, with Brinkley providing a three-minute commentary segment, "David Brinkley's Journal", from Washington several times a week.
On June 7, 1976, Brinkley returned to the anchor desk and tried the dual-anchor approach once again. Initially, Chancellor and Brinkley both reported from New York City, however Brinkley would later return to Washington. Chancellor again became sole anchor of Nightly News on October 10, 1979, with Brinkley once again providing commentaries until he left NBC for ABC News in 1981, where he became host of that network's new Sunday morning interview show This Week.
Despite the various changes, Chancellor was never able to break the grip that Walter Cronkite and the CBS Evening News had on the American news viewer, although Nightly News was sometimes a strong second place in the evening news ratings for most of the 1970s. After resigning from the anchor desk on April 2, 1982, Chancellor remained on the program as an editorial commentator until his retirement in 1993.
Tom Brokaw (1982–2004) On April 5, 1982, Tom Brokaw, who had been serving as anchor of Today since 1976, joined the program and took over co-anchor duties in New York City, while Roger Mudd became anchor in Washington. Mudd was removed from the broadcast and Brokaw became the solo anchor of Nightly News on September 5, 1983, the same day that his ABC competitor, Peter Jennings, became sole anchor of World News Tonight. With Brokaw being the sole anchor, the Nightly News was now completely based in New York City. Among other news items, he covered the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, EDSA Revolution, Loma Prieta earthquake, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Hurricane Andrew. As anchor, Brokaw conducted the first one-on-one American television interviews with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was the only network anchor in Berlin when the Berlin Wall fell. Brokaw's presence slowly attracted viewers, and during the 1990s, Nightly News battled for the viewership lead with World News Tonight. He and Katie Couric hosted a prime-time newsmagazine, Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric, that aired from 1993 to 1994 before being folded into the multi-night Dateline NBC program. By 1997, NBC Nightly News had solidified its first place standing in the ratings, a spot it would retain solely for ten years. The once-dominant CBS Evening News, anchored by Dan Rather, had lost a substantial portion of the audience it held during the Walter Cronkite era and slid to third place (where it still remains as of 2017) in the viewership wars.
On September 11, 2001, Brokaw joined Katie Couric and Matt Lauer at 9:48 a.m., following the attack on The Pentagon, and continued to anchor all day, until after midnight. Following the collapse of the second tower, Brokaw said:
On May 28, 2002, Brokaw announced his retirement as anchor of Nightly News, to take effect shortly after the Presidential election in 2004. During this last time helming the network's presidential election coverage, NBC graphic designers created images of a giant electoral map on the ice rink at Rockefeller Plaza, and cherry pickers tallied the electoral vote count on the façade of 30 Rockefeller Plaza (this tradition has continued with each election since then). Brokaw's final broadcast took place on December 1, 2004, ending 22 years on the Nightly News desk and a 21-year run as the network's chief newsman, a record tenure in NBC's history.
Brian Williams (2004–2015) Brian Williams, a frequent substitute for Brokaw for NBC Nightly News, succeeded him as the program's permanent anchor on December 2, 2004. The program held onto the #1 ratings spot among the network evening newscasts from Williams' first day, averaging about 10 million viewers each week until February 2007, when it traded places with its closest competitor World News with Charles Gibson. However, NBC Nightly News regained the lead a few months later; it has now been America's most-watched evening newscast for over a decade.
Williams rose to new levels of popularity for his live spot reporting during and after the 2005 hurricane season. With the transition to Williams, the show recognized its past in its opening seconds, with small photos of former anchors and sets and the voices of John Cameron Swayze, Huntley, Brinkley, Chancellor, and Brokaw, as well as an orchestral version of the "G-E-C" NBC Chimes serving as an intro bumper, before going into the opening headlines summary read by Williams; this opening sequence was discontinued on September 17, 2007, except for weekends and nights with substitute anchors until October 2007. On December 4, 2006, Nightly News was presented with "limited commercial interruptions" through a sponsorship arrangement with Philips, marking the first time in its 36-year history that the newscast experimented with reduced advertising.
During Williams' tenure as main anchor of the program, Lester Holt and Kate Snow often substituted while he was on vacation or on assignment; other substitute anchors included Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Savannah Guthrie, Tamron Hall, Harry Smith, Jenna Wolfe, Erica Hill, Hoda Kotb, Natalie Morales and Carl Quintanilla, as well as now-former NBC anchors Ann Curry, Campbell Brown, David Gregory, Amy Robach, Peter Alexander, and John Seigenthaler.
NBC Nightly News began broadcasting in high definition on March 26, 2007, becoming the first of the three network evening news programs to make the transition (the CBS Evening News began broadcasting in HD on January 7, 2008; ABC World News Tonight began broadcasting in HD on August 25, 2008, during its coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention). Most news video from on-remote locations continued to be shot in standard definition at the time, while the network's news bureaus underwent a conversion to HD, which was completed in 2009.
The Nightly News set in Studio 3C, which had been in use since January 27, 1992, was retired on May 4, 2007. The broadcast temporarily relocated to Studio 8G on the same set as of May 8, 2007, used for the studio segments seen during the network's Sunday Night Football broadcasts and its pregame show, and where NBC's 2006 Congressional election coverage originated. After months of construction, Studio 3C was re-opened on October 22, 2007, with the introduction of a new set for Nightly News; sister cable network MSNBC's new set in Studio 3A was also inaugurated at that time. On October 24, 2011, the broadcast moved to Studio 3B, which also served as the homebase of Williams' short-lived newsmagazine for NBC, Rock Center.
Embellishment scandal/suspension and replacement On February 4, 2015, Williams apologized on the program for having "conflated" on numerous occasions an account that he had been aboard a Chinook helicopter shot down by enemy fire from a rocket-propelled grenade while covering the Invasion of Iraq in 2003, when he was in fact aboard a helicopter that followed behind it. This came after he received criticism by U.S. soldiers for embellishing the story when a segment from the January 30, 2015, broadcast recounting the incident was posted on the program's Facebook page. The revelation spurred negative press towards Williams, including some asking for him to be fired by NBC News, although Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, stated that "persecuting [Williams] over this mistake will do little to help our veterans and service members".
Amid that controversy and questions over Williams' claims that made regarding his experiences while reporting from New Orleans on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, including that he contracted dysentery from accidentally ingesting flood water, the news division decided to launch an internal investigation into the matter that would be conducted through its investigative unit. On February 7, 2015, Williams stated in a memo to NBC News staff that he would take himself "off the daily broadcast for the next several days," with Lester Holt substituting for him on the weeknight broadcasts.