Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America’s longest-held hostages after he was snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, died April 21 at 76. (Mark Duncan/AP)
Exclusives
MacNeil first gained prominence for his coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings for the Public Broadcasting Service and began his half-hour Robert MacNeil Report on PBS in 1975 with his friend Lehrer as Washington correspondent. The broadcast became the MacNeil-Lehrer Report and then, in 1983, was expanded to an hour and renamed the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour. The nation’s first one-hour evening news broadcast, it was the recipient of multiple Emmy and Peabody awards. He was 93.
Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. He was later found liable for the deaths in a separate civil case, and then served nine years in prison on unrelated charges. He died Wednesday at 76.
Richard Leibner, a pioneering talent agent who represented such notable broadcast news journalists as Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney, Norah O’Donnell, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer and Fareed Zakaria, died Tuesday.
He starred alongside John Candy and Catherine O’Hara in SCTV, about a fictional TV station known as Second City Television that was stacked with buffoons in front of and behind the cameras. Flaherty’s characters included network boss Guy Caballero and the vampiric TV host Count Floyd. He won Emmys in 1982 and 1983 for his writing on SCTV and continued to work in TV and film for decades.
Gossett broke through on the small screen as Fiddler in ABC’s groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots, which depicted the atrocities of slavery on TV. The sprawling cast included Ben Vereen, LeVar Burton and John Amos. Gossett’s performance won him an Emmy. He was 87.
In August 1993, Angelos led a group of investors that bought the Orioles. The group included writer Tom Clancy, filmmaker Barry Levinson and tennis star Pam Shriver. The price tag of $173 million — at the time the highest for a sports franchise — came in a sale forced by the bankruptcy of then-owner Eli Jacobs. Angelos assumed a hands-on approach to running his hometown team. His reputation for not spending millions on high-priced free agents belied his net worth, which in 2017 was estimated at $2.1 billion. He was 94.
Over four decades, she rose to executive producer and helped secure interviews with presidents and other leaders in politics and the world of ideas.
Veteran New York City broadcast news anchor Bill Jorgensen, remembered for his show’s nightly admonishment, “It’s 10 o’clock — do you know where your children are?” died on Wednesday at age 96. Jorgensen was the founding anchor of the Ten O’Clock News on WNEW New York (Fox 5), which he hosted for over 12 years. He was recruited from Cleveland’s KYW-TV in 1967 to fill the slot. He signed off nightly with “Thanking you for your time this time, until next time.”
A “resident genius” at HBO, he guided the acquisitions of Warner Communications and Turner Broadcasting System before the ill-fated 2000 alliance.
She oversaw the production of Blue’s Clues and drew on her own childhood for The Backyardigans, in which five cartoon animals imagine their yard as a place of otherworldly adventure.
Mortensen announced in 2016 that he he had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Even while undergoing treatment, he was the first to confirm the retirement of Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning.
His journalism career began at a New Mexico newspaper in 1947. In 1953 he joined Broadcasting magazine in Washington and began covering television and radio with a passion that, except for a detour to CBS, continued for the next 50-plus years in positions of increasing influence, culminating in the trade magazine’s editorship. After that, he led the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation, never losing sight of his goal of full First Amendment rights for the electronic media. He was 94.
