For Feighery, that \u201cexposure to the outside world and seeing that understanding of our government and politics, it was a big influence on my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Annie Feighery (top row, right) and the groups of students from her New Mexico high school chosen for a 1993 class trip to Washington, D.C., in this photo taken by Berggren, who died in 2022. Photo by Dave Berggren via Facebook<\/p>\n
She and a handful of other students were selected for a school trip to Washington, D.C., during the first inauguration of former President Bill Clinton \u2014 a milestone that further cemented her curiosity about politics and how government works.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of amazing things happened that came together to seal an interest in government as a big part of my life and it started with the broader understanding of just the News Hour,\u201d said Feighery, now the head of an organization that works in international humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n
To this day, she doesn\u2019t miss the Friday political wrap.<\/a><\/p>\n When Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer teamed up to cover the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, the gavel-to-gavel coverage \u201cconvinced a lot of people that public television could do news and public affairs honorably and fairly and responsibly,\u201d the late MacNeil said. The first incarnation of the show, The Robert MacNeil Report, debuted in October 1975.<\/p>\n In the past five decades, the News Hour team has covered the biggest stories and interviewed leaders around the world. Here\u2019s a major moment from every year we\u2019ve been on air. Video by Julia Griffin and Timothy McPhillips\/PBS News<\/p>\n Gary Dixon, who has watched the program since the beginning, wrote that the program emerged at a time when local and network news was bending toward entertainment.<\/p>\n \u201cIt felt like the News Hour remained a safe way to get news that wasn\u2019t a product.\u201d<\/p>\n General coverage of the Nixon impeachment proceedings and NASA missions had \u201cwhet everyone\u2019s appetite of real news coverage,\u201d Dixon wrote. \u201cBut real, consistently good new coverage on a national level was hard to find.\u201d<\/p>\n As the show\u2019s founders once put it<\/a>, the News Hour stood out in the very different TV landscape decades ago, when there were only a handful of channels available. As cable news became more central to American politics, the field got more crowded.<\/p>\n \u201cI came of age during the advent of cable news,\u201d Feighery said, \u201cand so, while news was changing so much around me and the way people consume news and the news has been marketed as a consumer good, it felt like the News Hour remained a safe way to get news that wasn\u2019t a product.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say that the PBS News Hour hasn\u2019t changed over the decades. (For one, there\u2019s now a space in between \u201cNews\u201d and \u201cHour.\u201d)<\/p>\n Co-anchors Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Photo by Abbey Oldham<\/p>\n When Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff took over the anchor desk in 2013, becoming the first woman co-anchor team of a nightly news network television broadcast, it was a meaningful change for longtime fan Susan Fitzpatrick. <\/p>\n \u201cThe News Hour, as it went along, seemed to gain more confidence with each year that went by,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/07-5-e1760982760498.jpg\")
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