11 Facts About Richard Wald

Richard Charles Wald was an American television executive who served as the president of NBC News from 1973 to 1977 and senior vice president of ABC News from 1978 to 1999.

Richard Wald went to Stuyvesant High School and then Columbia College, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952, and rented an apartment with three of his classmates: future ABC News president Roone Arledge, PBS and NBC News president Larry Grossman, and The New York Times executive editor Max Frankel.

Richard Wald then studied at Clare College, Cambridge on a fellowship, and received a master's degree in English.

Richard Wald began his career in journalism with The New York Herald Tribune, where he served as a reporter and foreign correspondent, and eventually rose to become the paper's last managing editor before its demise in 1966.

Richard Wald served as the Sunday editor of the New York World Journal Tribune and assistant managing editor of The Washington Post before joining NBC in 1967.

In 1976, Richard Wald gave a speech in which he forecasted that television news would move beyond half-hour, nightly broadcasts and eventually expand to a continuous format, further predicting that a channel solely devoted to news would emerge within ten years.

Richard Wald left the network in 1977 due to friction with the management over unsatisfactory ratings.

Richard Wald was promoted to senior vice president for editorial quality, nicknamed the "ethics czar" of the network, tasked with reviewing that prospective stories met journalistic standards.

Richard Wald was married to his wife, the former Edith Leslie, from 1954 until her death in 2021, and they had three children.

Richard Wald's son, Jonathan Wald, is a media executive who was the executive producer of NBC Nightly News and was the senior vice president of Programming and Development at MSNBC.

Richard Wald had a stroke on May 8,2022, and died from complications five days later, on May 13, at a hospital in New Rochelle, New York, aged 92.