NBC

The National Broadcasting Company or NBC is an American television broadcasting company based in New York City's Rockefeller Center. It is now part of the media conglomerate NBC Universal, and supplies programming to more than 200 affiliated U.S. stations. NBC Universal is a unit of General Electric.

NBC News

While CBS has received more attention from historians discussing broadcast journalism history, NBC's news operation was equal to it. From 1956 through 1970, the television broadcast team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley consistently exceeded the viewership levels attained by CBS News and its main anchor Walter Cronkite. The pair, together with fellow correspondent Frank McGee, distinguished itself in the coverage of American manned space missions in the Project Mercury, Project Gemini and Project Apollo programs, during an era when space missions rated continuous coverage. (An entire studio, Studio 8H, was configured for this coverage, complete with models and mockups of rockets and spacecraft, maps of the earth and moon to show orbital trackage, and stages on which animated figures created by puppeteer Bil Baird were used to depict movements of astronauts before on-board spacecraft television cameras were feasible. Studio 8H is now the home of the NBC entertainment program Saturday Night Live.) The dominance ended when Huntley retired, to die a year later from cancer. The loss of Huntley, along with a reluctance of RCA to fund NBC News at the level CBS was funding CBS News, left NBC News in the doldrums. NBC News did not recover viewership levels until after GE acquired RCA.

Related Topics:
CBS - Chet Huntley - David Brinkley - Walter Cronkite - Frank McGee - Project Mercury - Project Gemini - Project Apollo - Studio 8H - Mockups - Bil Baird - Saturday Night Live

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NBC News got the first interview from two Russian presidents (Putin, Gorbachev) and was the only American eye-witness of the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Related Topics:
NBC News - Putin - Gorbachev

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In the second Iraq war, NBC News and main anchor Tom Brokaw covered the war like no other television company, in part owing to the willingness of GE to fund it. NBC News correspondent David Bloom pushed through the GE and U.S. Department of Defense bureaucracies permission to construct a mobile news vehicle that could transmit live video broadcasts from the battlefield. The "Bloommobile" brought satellite images and videos (clear, detailed) into homes of America and Europe, live and one-on-one. Bloom did not live to accept the accolades after the armed conflict; he died of natural causes unrelated to combat during the final phase of the fighting.

Related Topics:
Tom Brokaw - David Bloom

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NBC News also benefits from the GE corporate structure by having the ability to take reports from its cable counterpart MSNBC.

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