Lawrence Grossman

Lawrence Grossman was an American television executive.

He graduated from Columbia University in 1952 and spent one year at Harvard Law School before going to work in the promotions department of Look magazine. He joined the advertising department at CBS in 1956, then moved to NBC in 1962, becoming the network’s vice president of advertising. He ran his own advertising agency from 1966 to 1976.

Grossman moved to Washington in 1976 to take charge of PBS, at the time little more than a loosely aligned group of hundreds of locally controlled educational TV stations around the country. During his eight-year tenure, he maintained financial stability while giving PBS more of a national presence, largely through cultural programming and news.

He introduced such programs as Live From Lincoln Center and concerts from the White House and the Kennedy Center. He led efforts that expanded The MacNeil/Lehrer Report to a full hour in 1983, making it the first hour-long nightly newscast on any network.

In 1984, Grossman became the head of NBC News, personally chosen by network chief Grant Tinker. At the time, the network’s news division was slipping in ratings and respect, with its NBC Nightly News broadcast in third place behind CBS and ABC and the onetime morning-show juggernaut Today trailing ABC’s Good Morning America. Grossman helped engineer a turnaround at NBC within two years, as Nightly News occasionally outranked its competitors and Today became the No. 1 morning show.

He hoped to build on those gains and restore NBC’s news division to its former glory, but in 1986 the network was bought by General Electric. The new corporate leaders instituted across-the-board budget cuts, which Grossman ignored as long as he could. With his onetime patron, Tinker, out of the picture, Grossman often clashed with NBC’s new president, Robert C. Wright.

He came under growing internal attack by Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw, who questioned Grossman’s journalistic ability. Others pointed out that NBC had failed in several attempts to create a successful TV news magazine. Grossman was dismissed in 1988.

After leaving NBC, Grossman taught at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and, in 1993, became president of Horizons TV, a onetime challenger to PBS and C-SPAN.

In the late 1990s, he and former PBS chairman Newton Minow launched Digital Promise, a nonprofit organization that receives federal and private funding to use digital technologies to improve education.

Grossman died March 23, 2018, in Westport, Connecticut. He was 86.