page_title: NBC News
section_title: 2007–2016
hierarchical_section_title: NBC News / History / 2007–2016
caption_attribution_description: NBC Nightly News broadcastNightly News Broadcast
context_page_description: NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal News Group, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's various operations report to the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim. The NBC News Group also comprises MSNBC, the network's 24-hour general news channel, business and consumer news channels CNBC and CNBC World, the Spanish language Noticias Telemundo and United Kingdom-based Sky News.
  NBC News aired the first, regularly scheduled news program in American broadcast television history on February 21, 1940. The group's broadcasts are produced and aired from 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC's headquarters in New York City.
  The division presides over America's number-one-rated newscast, NBC Nightly News, and the longest-running television series in American history, Meet The Press, the Sunday morning program of newsmakers interviews. NBC News also offers 70 years of rare historic footage from the NBCUniversal Archives online.
context_section_description: During the financial crisis of 2007–2008, NBC News was urged to save $500 million by NBC Universal. On that occasion, NBC News laid off several of its in-house reporters such as Kevin Corke, Jeannie Ohm and Don Teague. This was the largest layoff in NBC News history.
  After the sudden death of the influential moderator Tim Russert of Meet the Press in June 2008, Tom Brokaw took over as an interim host; and on December 14, 2008, David Gregory became the new moderator of the show until August 14, 2014, when NBC announced that NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd would take over as the 12th moderator of Meet the Press starting September 7, 2014. David Gregory's last broadcast was August 10, 2014.
  By 2009, NBC had established leadership in network news, airing the highest-rated morning, evening, and Sunday interview news programs. Its ability to share costs with MSNBC and share in the cable network's advertising and subscriber revenue made it far more profitable than its network rivals.
  On March 27, 2012, NBC News broadcast an edited segment from a 911 call placed by George Zimmerman before he shot Trayvon Martin. The editing made it appear that Zimmerman volunteered that Martin was black, rather than merely responding to the dispatcher's inquiry, which would support a view that the shooting was racially motivated. A media watchdog organization accused NBC News of engaging in "an all-out falsehood." While NBC News initially declined to comment, the news agency did issue an apology to viewers. The Washington Post called the statement "skimpy on the details on just how the mistake unfolded."
  On December 13, 2012, NBC News reporter Richard Engel and his five crew members, Aziz Akyavaş, Ghazi Balkiz, John Kooistra, Ian Rivers and Ammar Cheikh Omar, were kidnapped in Syria. Having escaped after five days in captivity, Engel said he believed that a Shabiha group loyal to al-Assad was behind the abduction, and that the crew was freed by the Ahrar al-Sham group five days later. Engel's account was however challenged from early on. In April 2015, NBC had to revise the kidnapping account, following further investigations by The New York Times, which suggested that the NBC team "was almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army," rather than by a loyalist Shia group.
  In 2013 John Lapinski was Director of Elections, replacing Sheldon Gawiser.  In 2015 the election team's decision desk group was given its first permanent space at 30 Rockefeller, replacing the News Sales Archives that had occupied the space previously.
  The NBC News Division was the first news team to possess the tape of Donald Trump  recorded by Access Hollywood, after a producer of the NBC show had made the News Division aware of it; the News Division internally debated publishing it for three days, and then an unidentified source gave a copy of the tape to Washington Post Reporter David Fahrenthold, who contacted NBC for comment, notified the Trump campaign that he had the video, obtained confirmation of its authenticity, and released a story and the tape itself, scooping NBC. Alerted that the Post might release the story immediately, NBC News released its own story shortly after the Post story was published.
caption: NBC Nightly News broadcast, March 2008.
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