Richard Wald
American television executive
Richard Charles Wald (March 19, 1930 – May 13, 2022) was an American television executive who served as the president of NBC News from 1973 to 1977 and senior vice president of ABC News from 1978 to 1999.
Early life and education
Wald was born Manhattan in 1930; his father was an Austrian immigrant. He went to Stuyvesant High School and then Columbia College, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952, and rented an apartment with three of his classmates: future ABC News president Roone Arledge, PBS and NBC News president Larry Grossman, and The New York Times executive editor Max Frankel. He then studied at Clare College, Cambridge on a fellowship, and received a master's degree in English.
Career
Wald began his career in journalism with The New York Herald Tribune, where he served as a reporter and foreign correspondent, and eventually rose to become the paper's last managing editor before its demise in 1966. His colleagues at the Tribune included major figures of the New Journalism movement, such as Jim Bellows, Jimmy Breslin, Gail Sheehy, and Tom Wolfe. He also served as the Sunday editor of the New York World Journal Tribune and assistant managing editor of The Washington Post before joining NBC in 1967.
In January 1973, Wald became president of NBC News. During his time there, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky followed him at work for two days while writing the film Network, and he is considered the inspiration for William Holden's character in the film. In 1976, Wald gave a speech in which he forecasted that television news would move beyond half-hour, nightly broadcasts and eventually expand to a continuous format, further predicting that a channel solely devoted to news would emerge within ten years.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Wald” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.