Robert MacNeil, a driving force behind the show that would become the NewsHour on PBS, died Friday at the age of 93. Along with Jim Lehrer, MacNeil's Emmy-winning series of special reports on the 1973 gavel-to-gavel primetime coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings was also the turning point for the future of daily news on @PBS, leading to the creation of The Robert MacNeil Report, before it was renamed The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and other subsequent iterations, al

The show you now know as the PBS News Hour went on the air 50 years ago. “The Robert MacNeil Report” first appeared on television screens on Oct. 20, 1975, an outgrowth of MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s unprecedented gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings two years earlier. In the past five decades, our team has covered the biggest stories and interviewed leaders around the world. Here’s a major moment from every year we’ve been on air. | PBS NewsHour