Lester Holt
The First Black Sole Anchor of a Network Evening Newscast
Award-winning journalist Lester Holt rose through the ranks in a four-decade career that landed him in the seat of a flagship newscast for NBC that ranked number one in America under former hosts Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams. Since September 2011, Holt has served as principal anchor of the signature newsmagazine “Dateline NBC.” He was also named the “most trusted television news personality in America” by a 2018 Hollywood Reporter/Morning Consult poll.
Lester Don Holt, Jr. was born on Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County, California on March 8, 1959. He is the youngest of four children, and his parents, Lester Don Holt, Sr. and June (DeRozario) Holt are both of Jamaican descent. Holt grew up in Rancho Cordova, a city in Sacramento County, California. While in high school, Holt applied to several companies for work, but two months after graduating from Cordova High School in 1977, he received a rejection letter from NBC. Holt’s first paying broadcast job did come, but not in the way he expected. In a February 2012 issue of American Profile magazine, Holt said:
“My first on-air job was actually as a disc jockey at a Country and Western station. The only time I could land a full-time gig was if I was willing to report the news.”
Portrait of Lester Holt. Illustrated by Daniel J. Middleton.
NBC rejection letter from 1977, courtesy of Lester Holt.
He worked at the radio station on weekends while attending California State University in Sacramento, where he majored in government, but he dropped out in 1979 after the station offered him a full-time job, which obligated him to report the news. Talking to late-night host Seth Meyers, Holt added:
“They put me in a Jeep Cherokee with police scanners and two-way radios and I hit the streets and started covering news and I never looked back.”
CBS was the first major network to give Holt a shot at the career he was aiming for, when, In 1981, he landed a job at the television station in New York. He left New York to work at local CBS stations in Los Angeles and Chicago, but by 1983 he was back in New York working for CBS as a reporter and weekend anchor. Holt moved to Chicago-based WBBM-TV in 1986 and spent the next 14 years anchoring the evening news. But in 2000, the year he joined NBC, he was demoted from his anchor position, which devastated him for a time.
Despite the blow, Holt applied to MSNBC for an anchor position, which resulted in the daily news show, “Lester Holt Live.” He also served as MSNBC’s primary anchor, which involved coverage of the network’s major news events. In 2003 he moved to NBC News and was made a substitute anchor for NBC Nightly News and Today. When Brian Williams, host of NBC Nightly News took medical leave in 2013 for knee surgery, Holt took over hosting duties for the broadcast. Then in 2015, Brian Williams was suspended for exaggerating a story about being aboard a U.S. military helicopter in Iraq that drew enemy fire. After serving as the interim anchor for a few months, Holt became the permanent NBC Nightly News anchor in June of that year.
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This article appears in 21st Century Black Changemakers.
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A veteran of MSNBC, Rashida Jones worked her way up from an executive producer and managing editor, to president of the entire cable news network.