Excerpt
ROBERT MACNEIL, 1973 (Editor, Newshour): Good evening from Washington. In a few moments, we’re going to bring you the entire proceedings in the first day of the Senate Watergate hearings -- hearings to bear the truth about the wide range of illegal, unethical or improper activities established or still merely alleged, surrounding the reelection of President Nixon last year.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): May 17, 1973. Day one of the historic Senate hearings that would a year later lead to the resignation of an American President.
It was also the start of something quite new for public broadcasting, led by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer.
JIM LEHRER, 1973: We are running it all each day because we think these hearings are the important and because we think it is important that you get a chance to see the whole thing and make your own judgments. Some nights, we may be in competition with a late, late movie. We are doing this as an experiment, temporarily abandoning our ability to edit, to give you the whole story, however many hours it may take.
JEFFREY BROWN: The botched break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington D.C. had happened one year earlier.
The special Senate committee was set to build on reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post and reporters at other news organizations.
Note that the Newshour's coverage of the Watergate scandal was what got me hooked on PBS Newshour. Even now I consider Newshour the best news program on TV.
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