NBC News anchor Lester Holt may very well be the last of a dying breed in the evening news business.
On Friday, Holt said goodbye to the Nightly News chair he has commanded for ten years. Praised for his hard work, on-the-ground reporting, and coverage of international events poured in, many giving him an A-plus for his friendly demeanor.
But Holt’s decision to walk away from what was once the most visible and celebrated job in network news underscores a sharp shift in television culture. Once, evening anchors were highly paid celebrities and would never leave the post voluntarily. Now, those occupying the chair — as opposed to the more lucrative morning shows — are lesser paid and lower-profile, sometimes even obscure.
Holt, 66, was succeeded Monday at Nightly by Tom Llamas. The 45-year-old son of Cuban refugees, who joined NBC in 2021 after serving as ABC’s weekend anchor, may be a highly competent journalist — he’s won multiple Emmys — but honestly, how many people in America have heard of him?
It’s a far cry from Katie Couric’s splashy $15-million debut as CBS anchor, an experiment that ended badly. When CBS — after the departure of Norah O’Donnell, who also chose to walk away — gave her chair to veteran journalist John Dickerson, the network paired him with Maurice DuBois, who was not known even by many in the TV business outside the New York area.
Holt is moving full-time to NBC’s magazine show Dateline, where he has been an anchor since 2011. Holt says he is looking forward to “doing more reporting” and “slowing down a bit.” Now Holt will get to work on a single story months in advance.
“For 45 years, I’ve been answering the bell. Breaking news, mass shootings, and just horrific things,” Lester Holt said. Addressing his step back from the post, he said, “It’s life-changing and it’s life-changing for your family, too. People at these moments say I want to spend more time with my family. It’s true.”
The prominent, traditionally-styled network news anchor like Holt is slowly disappearing in the era of 24/7 media consumption. Gone are the days of the “Big Three” anchors as the main news broadcasters. NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s Peter Jennings, and CBS’s Dan Rather dominated the airwaves in the 80s and 90s, before cable and the internet, not to mention streaming and podcasting, transformed the television landscape.
The Big Three newscasts still reach a sizable audience of roughly 18 million viewers combined, but nothing like in the Cronkite era, when a vast swath of the audience would tune in at 6:30. Cable news now instantly covers anything that can be hyped as “breaking news” and smothers it in raw opinion, from left and right.
I’m not a big evening news watcher, although I will dip in and out on occasion. And I remember the 80s, fondly watching them every day for a set period of time. Now I flip around all day on cable nets and it can feel like overload. My finger isn’t far from the mute button.
I first met Lester Holt during Pope Francis’s first visit to the United States in 2015. While I was working with the Pope’s team, Holt was one of the first people to greet me and my family. He couldn’t have been nicer, asking about my job and my son’s interests. He had a calm about him that was grounding.
Almost like a bookend to his career, Holt recently met Pope Leo XIV in Rome as he was anointed as the leader of the Catholic Church. These are just two examples of the anchor’s pervasive presence at big stories. When news happened, NBC News made sure Holt was there planting a flag. Just like in olden days.
Holt came up through the ranks from local news reporter, joining MSNBC in 2000 as a correspondent, and worked his way to weekend anchor, fill-in anchor, and ultimately the first Black male solo anchor of a weeknight evening newscast. He was also a principal anchor at Dateline.
He earned these jobs slowly, with journalistic chops, paying his dues and winning awards along the way. Holt isn’t perfect; his moderation of a 2016 presidential debate that spun out of control was widely criticized.
On Llamas’s first evening at the top of the broadcast, he didn’t mention his transition to permanent anchor. It wasn’t until the end that he spent a grand total of 12 seconds addressing his new role.
“That’s it for Nightly News, my first as the anchor of this great broadcast. My thanks to all of you as we start this new adventure together,” he stated. And in what may turn out to be his tagline, he said, “Tonight and always, we’re here for you.”
A commercial promoting Llamas appeared during the broadcast, and a New York Times ad online showed rapid-fire images of David Brinkley, John Chancellor, Brian Williams, and Holt morphing into Llamas. It seems odd that there wasn’t a bigger publicity splash, though Llamas did a Q&A with The Washington Post. Llamas’s demeanor during the show seemed to give off the vibe that he just wanted to get through it without taking any risks.
The big-time anchor breed isn’t quite dead yet. The top-rated evening news anchor is ABC’s David Muir, who came up the old-fashioned way, through local news, and has also reported from around the globe.
Muir told People magazine, “I remember being outside, playing with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood and being the only kid who would go inside when the local news came on, and then watching Peter Jennings, who I thought was sort of the James Bond of the evening news, the globetrotter.”
Unlike Holt and O’Donnell, Muir, 51, sounds like he’s holding onto that chair for as long as humanly possible. Hey, Dan Rather is still working at 93.
Holt admits he will miss the deadline pressure, and a highlight reel shown on his program on his last night shows that he enjoys playing the upright bass.
As he signed off Friday, he repeated his signature parting words to the audience, “Take care of yourself and each other.”
Lester Holt is lucky: he had a long run and now gets to slow down, but not leave the game. Others will face more difficult choices with such a fragmented audience. The era of what were once fearfully called “anchor-monsters” is drawing to a close.
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NBC News hasn’t been right since Tim Russert passed away. It was ruined by Chuck Todd and his TDS infected acolytes.