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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Come Thanksgiving weekend in 1947, there were still fewer than 50,000 television sets in all of America, and most of those were still concentrated in the greater New York metropolitan area.  

But that Sunday, November 26, witnessed the first regularly scheduled broadcast of Meet The Press – still the longest running program in all of broadcasting history.

Meet The Press was the brainchild of Martha Rountree, a trailblazing journalist and producer and arguably the first woman of any stature in broadcast news in America.  Born in Florida, raised in South Carolina, Rountree began her career in the 1930s, eventually co-founding Radio House, a production company specializing in public affairs programming.  

In 1945 Rountree joined forces with Lawrence Spivak, the publisher of The American Mercury, a political and cultural affairs magazine founded in the 1920s by renowned journalists H.L. Mencken and George Nathan. Spivak wanted a radio program to promote the magazine. Rountree delivered The American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press, which aired on Mutual Radio beginning in 1945.

Rountree was the first host of the program. With Spivak often joining her, the show earned a strong following for its no-nonsense format, with Rountree moderating a panel of journalists asking rigorous questions of public figures.  

in 1947, NBC was looking for news and public affairs oriented programming and approached Rountree about adapting her radio program for television.  Rountree accepted the offer, but only on the condition that she retain full editorial control, which was rare for any producer at the time, let alone a woman in the male-dominated world of broadcast journalism.

NBC’s Meet The Press debuted on New York’s WNBT Thursday evening November 6, 1947, (before moving to its now-familiar Sunday morning time slot by the end of the month.^⁠1 Martha Rountree continued as the host and moderator — making her the first woman to moderate a public affairs program on American television. 

The first televised edition of Meet The Press featured James A. Farley, the former Postmaster General and Democratic Party chairman under FDR.  Farley was grilled on-camera by a panel of Washington journalists, including Spivak. 

Three weeks later the show was slated into the Sunday morning slot where it has aired continuously ever since. Every Sunday, some high-profile newsmaker sat at a desk facing a panel of journalists. The questioning was sharp, and the panelists were not obliged to be polite. Rountree enforced a disciplined structure: no speechifying, no commercials during the interview, and no softball questions.  

With television still in its  ‘single-sponsor’ era, General Foods backed the show, looking to lend its brands credibility by aligning with serious, public interest programming.  General Foods remained the primary sponsor throughout the 1950s, as Meet The Press became a cornerstone of NBC’s growing public affairs and news division. 

In 1953, in a mutual decision that some accounts have attributed to a coin toss, Martha Rountree sold her interest in Meet the Press to Spivak, who continued to host the program for more than thirty years.  Spivak transferred full ownership to NBC in 1955.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the show’s guest list included towering figures from the Cold War era: Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, and Fidel Castro, who was interviewed in Havana in 1959. Spivak’s calm but unflinching style earned the show its reputation as a serious forum, neither a soapbox nor a trap.

The success of Meet The Press inspired a slate of similar programs:  CBS followed suit with Face The Nation starting in 1954.  ABC’s Issue and Answers aired from 1960-1981 and ABC This Week from 1981 to today.  PBS created Inside Washington, The McLaughlin Group, and Washington Week.  In the 1980s and 90s, cable entered the arena with Fox Sunday and State of the Union on CNN. 

After Spivak’s retirement in 1975, Meet The Press was hosted by a succession of journalists, including Bill Monroe, Garrick Utley, and Marvin Kalb. In 1991, Tim Russert took over and restored the program’s prestige and ratings until his sudden death 2008.

Over nearly eight decades, Meet the Press has weathered changes in the media landscape, the political environment, and technology. It has survived the decline of single-sponsor television, the rise of cable news, and the fragmentation of audiences in the 21^st century.  Its early success demonstrated that television could live up to its mandate to use the airwaves for public service, and audiences could see what civic engagement looks like when cameras replaced the stenographer’s pad and accountability went coast-to-coast.

After Tim Russert’s death, Meet The Press was hosted by David Gregory and Chuck Todd.  Todd was replaced by Kristen Welker in 2023 – the first woman in the host’s chair since Martha Rountree 70 years before. 

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¹ Meet The Press  initially aired only locally on WNBT, the RCA/NBC affiliate in New York.  The show went national in early 1948. WNBT became WNBC-TV in 1954.

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