In 1977, Cafferty moved to WNBC-TV in New York City as a weekend, then evening co-anchor on the station's 6:00 p.m. news hour. In 1979 Cafferty became co-anchor of WNBC-TV's 5:00 p.m weeknight newscast, and the following year he was joined on the program by Sue Simmons. Their show was reformatted as "Live at Five", and its mix of news, features and celebrity interviews would prove successful for much of the 1980s. Cafferty left WNBC-TV in 1989 and joined rival WNYW, where he anchored the Fox flagship station's 7:00 p.m. news and a short-lived late night show, "Newsline New York". In 1992 Cafferty moved to then-independent station WPIX, and co-anchored its 10:00 p.m. newscast until joining CNN in 1998.