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NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's various operations report to the president of NBC News, Rebecca Blumenstein. The NBCUniversal News Group also comprises MSNBC, the network's 24-hour general news channel, business and consumer news channels CNBC and CNBC World, the Spanish language Noticias Telemundo and United Kingdom–based Sky News. NBC News aired the first regularly scheduled news program in American broadcast television history on February 21, 1940. The group's broadcasts are produced and aired from 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBCUniversal's headquarters in New York City. The division presides over America's number-one-rated newscast, NBC Nightly News, the world's first of its genre morning television program, Today, and the longest-running television series in American history, Meet the Press, the Sunday morning program of newsmakers interviews. NBC News also offers 70 years of rare historic footage from the NBCUniversal Archives online. History Caravan era The first regularly scheduled American television newscast in history was made by NBC News on February 21, 1940, anchored by Lowell Thomas (1892–1981), and airing weeknights at 6:45 p.m. It was simply Lowell Thomas in front of a television camera while doing his NBC network radio broadcast, the television simulcast seen only in New York. In June 1940, NBC, through its flagship station in New York City, W2XBS (renamed commercial WNBT in 1941, now WNBC) operating on channel one, televised 30¼ hours of coverage of the Republican National Convention live and direct from Philadelphia. The station used a series of relays from Philadelphia to New York and on to upper New York State, for rebroadcast on W2XB in Schenectady (now WRGB), making this among the first "network" programs of NBC Television. Due to wartime and technical restrictions, there were no live telecasts of the 1944 conventions, although films of the events were reportedly shown over WNBT the next day. About this time, there were irregularly scheduled, quasi-network newscasts originating from NBC's WNBT in New York City, (WNBC), and reportedly fed to WPTZ (now KYW-TV) in Philadelphia and WRGB in Schenectady, NY. Such as, Esso sponsored news features a well as The War As It Happens in the final days of World War II, another irregularly scheduled NBC television newsreel program which was also seen in New York, Philadelphia and Schenectady on the relatively few (roughly 5000) television sets which existed at the time. After the war, NBC Television Newsreel aired filmed news highlights with narration. Later in 1948, when sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, NBC Television Newsreel was renamed Camel Newsreel Theatre and then, when John Cameron Swayze was added as an on-camera anchor in 1949, the program was renamed Camel News Caravan. In 1948, NBC teamed up with Life magazine to provide election night coverage of President Harry S. Truman's surprising victory over New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. The television audience was small, but NBC's share in New York was double that of any other outlet. The following year, the Camel News Caravan, anchored by John Cameron Swayze, debuted on NBC. Lacking the graphics and technology of later years, it nonetheless contained many of the elements of modern newscasts. NBC hired its own film crews and in the program's early years, it dominated CBS's competing program, which did not hire its own film crews until 1953. (by contrast, CBS spent lavishly on Edward R. Murrow's weekly series, See It Now). In 1950, David Brinkley began serving as the program's Washington correspondent, but attracted little attention outside the network until paired with Chet Huntley in 1956. In 1955, the Camel News Caravan fell behind CBS' Douglas Edwards with the News, and Swayze lost the already tepid support of NBC executives. The following year, NBC replaced the program with the Huntley-Brinkley Report. Beginning in 1951, NBC News was managed by Director of News Bill McAndrew, who reported to Vice President of News and Public Affairs J. Davidson Taylor. Huntley-Brinkley era Television assumed an increasingly prominent role in American family life in the late 1950s, and NBC News was called television's "champion of news coverage." NBC president Robert Kintner provided the news division with ample amounts of both financial resources and air time. In 1956, the network paired anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and the two became celebrities, supported by reporters including John Chancellor, Frank McGee, Edwin Newman, Sander Vanocur, Nancy Dickerson, Tom Pettit, and Ray Scherer. Created by Producer Reuven Frank, NBC's The Huntley–Brinkley Report had its debut on October 29, 1956. During much of its 14-year run, it exceeded the viewership levels of its CBS News competition, anchored initially by Douglas Edwards and, beginning in April 1962, by Walter Cronkite. NBC's Vice President of News and Public Affairs, J. Davidson Taylor, was a Southerner who, with Producer Reuven Frank, was determined that NBC would lead television's coverage of the civil rights movement. In 1955, NBC provided national coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, airing reports from Frank McGee, then News Director of NBC's Montgomery affiliate WSFA-TV, who would later join the network. A year later, John Chancellor's coverage of the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas was the first occasion when the key news story came from television rather than print and prompted a prominent U.S. senator to observe later, "When I think of Little Rock, I think of John Chancellor." Other reporters who covered the movement for the network included Sander Vanocur, Herbert Kaplow, Charles Quinn, and Richard Valeriani, who was hit with an ax handle at a demonstration in Marion, Alabama in 1965. While Walter Cronkite's enthusiasm for the space race eventually won the anchorman viewers for CBS and NBC News, with the work of correspondents such as Frank McGee, Roy Neal, Jay Barbree, and Peter Hackes, also provided ample coverage of American crewed space missions in the Project Mercury, Project Gemini, and Project Apollo programs. In an era when space missions rated continuous coverage, NBC configured its largest studio, Studio 8H, for space coverage. It utilized 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 had been home to the NBC Symphony Orchestra and is now the home of Saturday Night Live.) NBC's coverage of the first Moon landing in 1969 earned .... Discover the Nbc News popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Nbc News books.