Tom Brokaw serves as anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, a position he is contracted to hold until the end of 2004. Sole anchor of the program since 1983, he had previously been anchor of NBC News’ Today Show from 1976 to 1982 and had worked in a series of increasingly prominent assignments for NBC News. Brokaw’s distinctively smooth style and boyish charm have made him a well-recognized star through the shifting stakes in television news in the 1980s and 1990s.

After an early position in Sioux City, Iowa, Brokaw’s career in broadcast news began in earnest in 1962 when he worked in Omaha, Nebraska. He moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1965 to report on the civil rights movement, then joined NBC in Los Angeles as a reporter and anchor in 1966. From the west coast, Brokaw moved to Washington, D.C., eventually becoming NBC’s White House correspondent during the Watergate era. In 1976 and 1980, he was a member of the NBC News team of floor reporters for the Democratic and Republican conventions. Since 1984 he has served as anchor of all NBC News coverage of the primaries, national conventions, and presidential election nights. In the fall of 1987, Brokaw scored a number of high-profile successes, interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin, Ronald Reagan in the White House, and in December 1987 moderating a live, televised debate from Washington among all declared candidates for the presidential nomination from both parties. He also moderated the first debate among the declared Democratic candidates for president in December 1991.

Brokaw’s opportunity to serve as anchor arose when, after being courted by ABC, NBC countered by teaming him with Roger Mudd (apparently attempting to replicate the Chet Huntley/David Brinkley pairing), and the two went on the air as co-anchors in April 1982. Mudd was soon dropped by NBC, and Brokaw took over as sole anchor in August 1983. At CBS Dan Rather had replaced Walter Cronkite in 1981; at ABC Peter Jennings, who had anchored from 1965 to 1968, returned to that position in 1983; and thus a three-man race was put in place that continues to structure the national nightly news.

When each of the networks was bought by a large conglomerate in the mid-1980s (ABC by Capital Cities, CBS by Laurence Tisch’s Loews Corporation, and NBC by General Electric), network news divisions became cost-accountable in new ways that also impinged on the importance of the anchor. While budgets and staffs were cut, promotional campaigns were expanded, and, increasingly, the center of those campaigns was the persona of the news anchor, who became a virtual corporate symbol.

Brokaw has been one of the most well-recognized participants in the trend toward expanding the role of the news reader into a prominent position of creative control and celebrity. Along with Rather and Jennings, Brokaw emerged in the 1990s as a kind of living logo, the image taken to be representative of an entire news organization. A number of critics have raised questions about the quality and integrity of news presentation in this increasingly star-driven climate, charging that on the national news broadcasts, journalism has become subordinate to entertainment. Brokaw was reportedly the model for William Hurt’s Tom Grunick, the protagonist in James L. Brooks’s 1987 film Broadcast News.

As an anchor, Brokaw is renowned for his globetrotting, and he has provided live coverage of such important events as the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, North Atlantic Treaty Organization attacks in Yugoslavia, and the events following the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. In addition to NBC Nightly News, Brokaw anchored, with Katie Couric, the nighttime program. Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric (1993–94) as well as the short-lived Exposé, a news magazine show on the order of 60 Minutes.

He has also anchored a number of prime-time specials, including a January 1999 special on the “Greatest Generation.” That program profiled some of the same people discussed by Brokaw in his books The Greatest Generation (1998), The Greatest Generation Speaks (1999), and An Album of Memories (2001). Each of these projects reflects Brokaw’s abiding interest in the stories of Americans who grew up in the Depression, served in World War II, and participated prominently in shaping postwar U.S. society.

In May 2002, NBC announced that Brokaw will end his term as anchor of NBC Nightly News at the end of 2004, to be succeeded by CNBC’s Brian Williams. Brokaw intends to continue as a contributor to NBC News after he leaves the anchor desk.