NBC News in April 1962, by Walter Cronkite. NBC's vice president of news and public affairs, J. Davidson Taylor, was a Southerner who, with producer Reuven Frank, was determined that NBC would lead television's coverage of the civil rights movement. In 1955, NBC provided national coverage of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s leadership of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, airing reports from Frank McGee, then news director of NBC's Montgomery affiliate WSFA-TV, who would later join the network. A year later, John Chancellor's coverage of the admission of black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas was the first
Walter Cronkite added to the McCain-Feingold-Shays-Meehan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2001 that would have required TV broadcast companies to provide free airtime to candidates. Cronkite criticized the present system of campaign finance which allows elections to "be purchased" by special interests, and he noted that all the European democracies "provide their candidates with extensive free airtime." "In fact," Cronkite pointed out, "of all the major nations worldwide that profess to have democracies, only seven – just seven – do not offer free airtime" This put the United States on a list with Ecuador, Honduras, Malaysia, Taiwan, Tanzania, and Trinidad and Tobago.