A familiar and trusted broadcast presence in New York City over the last 50 years has signed off the air for the final time: Chuck Scarborough, who has anchored or coanchored WNBC TV since Nixon was in office, America was in Vietnam and the city itself was teetering on economic failure, surprised many viewers Thursday when he announced on air that he had just delivered his final newscast.
While Scarborough, 81, hadn’t exactly kept his semi-retirement plans a secret in recent weeks, the goodbye no doubt came as unwelcome news to many loyal and longtime viewers.
“From one Chuck to another,” tweeted New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, “Best wishes on your next chapter, Chuck. You didn’t just tell us the news, you made NYers feel at home and for that we thank you.”
Scarborough joined NBC News in March 1974 as co-anchor with Jim Hartz of WNBC-TV’s then-new 5:00 PM newscast, eventually, he became the station’s lead anchor at 6pm and 11pm, and in 2003, he became what many called the unofficial “dean” of New York-area television news anchors when WABC-TV anchor Bill Beutel retired after 37 years.
Over the years at WNBC, Scarborough worked with colleagues Marv Albert, Len Berman, Jack Cafferty, Dr. Frank Field, Pat Harper, Pia Lindstrom, Sue Simmons, Al Roker, and Tom Snyder, among others.
Scarborough says he’ll continue to work on special reports and other station projects for WNBC, but his day-and-day at the anchor desk was over as of Dec. 12.
Here’s a transcript of Scarborough’s final sign-off message. Read it below, or listen to the video above.
Chuck Scarborough: This is my final broadcast as anchor of the evening news on NBC 4 New York.
First and foremost, I am profoundly grateful for your trust. Without that, I would not have survived for more than half a century in this job and been allowed to occupy this front row seat to the history of our fascinating metropolis and the world beyond for so long.
Four months after I arrived in 1974, President Nixon, who won a landslide election just two-years earlier, resigned. The first presidential resignation in the nation’s history.
In 1975, New York City plunged into effective bankruptcy and the Vietnam war came to a chaotic end.
The pace of breaking news has been relentless ever since. We’ve been through blackouts together, riots, crime waves, hurricanes, blizzards, economic crises, corruption (public and private), 9/11, wars and a pandemic.
But just as important were the stories of human achievement in the arts and sciences, of forgiveness, kindness, recovery, and resilience.
If there is one overarching lesson I’ve learned, it is that we are more resilient than we realize – individually and as a city and nation. We get knocked down, and we come back stronger.
I will be eternally grateful for the privilege of working with so many dedicated, brilliant and talented broadcast journalists on both sides of the camera, some risking their lives in dangerous places to bring you the news.
In this age of algorithms and cable channels herding the citizenry into like-minded silos of A.I., and social media fictions suffocating truth, it has never been more important to do what they do so well: hue to the basic principles of accuracy, objectivity and fairness.
I’m going to leave you with a final thought I shared with my NBC colleagues earlier this year when they gathered in the Rainbow Room to celebrate my 50th anniversary with the National Broadcasting Company – itself a quintessential American success story, founded by a Russian immigrant named David Sarnoff, who began by selling newspapers at age 15 to help support his struggling family.
I urged my colleagues to do something I still do to re-establish perspective, appreciation, a sense of mission.
Walk out on Fifth Avenue, and look back through the Channel Gardens, across the skating rink, above the statue, at this towering building with awe, and say: “I work here. I work here, and this is important. What I do is important. I work for the National Broadcasting Company, the oldest and largest television network in this country, with a storied history.”
Feel the weight of that history. The weight of the responsibility that we all bear to get it right, to do it well, to make it interesting. It’s an honor to work with you.
That message was aimed at our work here, the grinding challenges of daily news gathering. But it just as easily applies to our city, and to our country, and to all of you – all of us.
We all need to lift our eyes occasionally from the political fevers and societal imperfections of the day and appreciate what we have, how far we’ve come, and the opportunity we’ve been given to continue our journey toward a more perfect union.
Thank you, and good night.
