Legendary broadcast journalist Chuck Scarborough 'retires' after more than 50 years, will remain part of WNBC

After a career spanning more than 50 years, veteran broadcast journalist Chuck Scarborough has resigned from his day-to-day news anchoring duties at NBC 4 New York. He is best known for his partnership with Sue Simmons. New Yorkers know them as "Chuck & Sue."

Chuck Scarborough last day anchoring the 6 p.m. news at WNBC was Thursday, 12 Dec. 2024. He will continue to be a part of the WNBC family and provide special reports and contributions to special station projects and programming. 

To celebrate his retirement after 50 years with NBC New York, Campbell Brett and Grace Brett had a special and loving message for their grandaddy, Chuck Scarborough. Here's his message to viewers as he closed out his final broadcast:

This is my final broadcast as anchor of the evening news on NBC 4 New York.

First and foremost, I am profoundly grateful for your trust. Without that, I would not have survived for more than half a century in this job and been allowed to occupy this front row seat to the history of our fascinating metropolis and the world beyond for so long.

Four months after I arrived in 1974, President Nixon, who won a landslide election just two-years earlier, resigned. The first presidential resignation in the nation’s history.

In 1975, New York City plunged into effective bankruptcy and the Vietnam war came to a chaotic end.

The pace of breaking news has been relentless ever since. We’ve been through blackouts together, riots, crime waves, hurricanes, blizzards, economic crises, corruption (public and private), 9/11, wars and a pandemic.

But just as important were the stories of human achievement in the arts and sciences, of forgiveness, kindness, recovery, and resilience.

If there is one overarching lesson I’ve learned, it is that we are more resilient than we realize – individually and as a city and nation. We get knocked down, and we come back stronger.

I will be eternally grateful for the privilege of working with so many dedicated, brilliant and talented broadcast journalists on both sides of the camera, some risking their lives in dangerous places to bring you the news.

In this age of algorithms and cable channels herding the citizenry into like-minded silos of A.I., and social media fictions suffocating truth, it has never been more important to do what they do so well: hue to the basic principles of accuracy, objectivity and fairness.

I’m going to leave you with a final thought I shared with my NBC colleagues earlier this year when they gathered in the Rainbow Room to celebrate my 50th anniversary with the National Broadcasting Company – itself a quintessential American success story, founded by a Russian immigrant named David Sarnoff, who began by selling newspapers at age 15 to help support his struggling family.

I urged my colleagues to do something I still do to re-establish perspective, appreciation, a sense of mission.

Walk out on Fifth Avenue, and look back through the Channel Gardens, across the skating rink, above the statue, at this towering building with awe, and say: “I work here. I work here, and this is important. What I do is important. I work for the National Broadcasting Company, the oldest and largest television network in this country, with a storied history.”

Feel the weight of that history. The weight of the responsibility that we all bear to get it right, to do it well, to make it interesting. It’s an honor to work with you.

That message was aimed at our work here, the grinding challenges of daily news gathering. But it just as easily applies to our city, and to our country, and to all of you – all of us.

We all need to lift our eyes occasionally from the political fevers and societal imperfections of the day and appreciate what we have, how far we’ve come, and the opportunity we’ve been given to continue our journey toward a more perfect union.

Thank you, and good night.