R.I.P.: NBC Newsman Garrick Utley

Garrick Utley

The veteran reporter, a frequent substitute anchor on “NBC Nightly News” and former moderator of “Meet the Press,” passed away following a long battle with cancer.

He was 74.

Utley served as weekend anchor during much of the 1970s, and frequently substituted for John Chancellor during that decade and for Tom Brokaw in the 1980s on NBC Nightly News. Utley also served as weekend anchor Sundays,1987–1990 and Saturdays 1990- 1993 of NBC Nightly News.

In the 1970s, Utley frequently hosted newsmagazine-style programs for NBC News. In the UK he covered the February 1974 British General Election, and appeared on the BBC election night program. In the US, from January 1989 to December 1991, he moderated NBC's long-running public affairs discussion program Meet the Press, while simultaneously hosting the newly-debuted Sunday version of the Today Show.

In 1992, Utley issued a controversial commentary essay at the close of a weekend newscast, expressing a view that then-President George H.W. Bush should forgo reelection in the interest of the country.

Most recently Utley was a professor of broadcasting and journalism at State University of New York - Oswego and was a senior fellow at the SUNY Levin Institute of the State University of New York, in Manhattan, from which he retired as head in December 2011.

He also hosted Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on public television.

From 2009...