Nightly News   |  May 10, 2011

Jeff Gralnick, legendary TV news producer, dies

Legendary news producer Jeff Gralnick, who worked for CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN during a half-century in broadcast news and led the top-rated broadcasts of both "Nightly News with Tom Brokaw" and "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings," has died. He was 72. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>> we lost a member of our family here today, and it's important that you know about our friend jeff gralnick, because for over 50 years he's been behind so much of what you've seen on television on this network and on three others. jeff gralnick started on tv at cbs news in 1959 . while he was a producer by trade, american viewers also saw his work when he reported on air from vietnam. the tet offensive and khe sanh . he was later among the first producers at "60 minutes." from there it was on to abc news and nbc news and cnn. he worked with all of them. cronkite, kuralt, reasoner, jennings, brokaw, and yours truly starting in 1993 . he brought abc's newscast from third to first, then came over here and did the very same thing when tom brokaw was in this chair. jeff loved politics, went to work for george mcgovern briefly, but the pull of covering space shots, conventions, elections, wars, and revolutions just proved too much, so he went back to the news bis business. he was at my side on election nights and most recently was a special consultant to our news division president steve capas. we found a quote from jeff today which was kind of perfect. "always demand what is right. never accept second best." jeff gralnick was a fixer, a teacher, a taskmaster, a leader, a husband, a parent, and a friend. he was 72 years old.