Tom Brokaw, a face on NBC news for nearly 40 years, was once asked to be the voice behind the presidency.

“It was like having a doctor look at you and say you have terminal cancer,” said Brokaw, who was offered the position of press secretary for Richard Nixon. “I wanted to tell him, ‘I come from a family whose lives were saved by FDR, who worshiped at the altar of Harry Truman. My family hates Richard Nixon.'”

Brokaw went on to report on the Watergate scandal.

Through corporate takeovers, changing technology and the explosion of the news market, broadcast news has evolved to suit changing needs, Brokaw told about 600 people packed into Ryan Family Auditorium Monday for Medill’s Crain lecture series.

When Brokaw began anchoring “NBC Nightly News” in 1983, the public had three options for evening updates: ABC, CBS and NBC. Network news reflected the vision of white middle-class men based in Washington or New York, he said.

“Sometimes we covered California, but it would be one of those, ‘Oh, that’s California for you’ stories when in fact California was defining the rest of the country,” Brokaw said. “Reagan was growing up there in office.”

Although recruiters now target minorities to join all aspects of the reporting process, Brokaw said he’d still like to see broadcasts tailored to reflect three regions of America: the Eastern seaboard, the Heartland and the Pacific Rim.

Brokaw said corporate takeovers have been a mixed blessing throughout his career. While General Electric brought much-needed organization and financial savvy to the station, the owners don’t always value creativity as much as journalists do, he said.

But under GE’s ownership, NBC took advantage of different news outlets, including NBC.com, MSNBC and CNBC.

“In that way, GE saved NBC,” Brokaw said. “Under the indifferent absentee direction of (Radio Corporation of America), we wouldn’t have survived.”

More than merely surviving, the station has thrived using new technology that makes round-the-clock international reporting faster and less expensive.

“GE might not be a perfect fit with NBC production mentality, but I don’t know any news agency that doesn’t have that problem,” Brokaw said. “These (problems) are inherent in the modern age of news ownership.”

Brokaw, who has covered every presidential election since 1964, also talked about covering politicians. Journalists should focus on candidates as a whole rather than isolating certain parts of their background, he said.

“It turns out that neither one of these guys have a sterling academic record,” Brokaw said of presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush. “It’s clear Gore would get into Medill, but Bush is on the bubble.”

But politicians ranging from Congressman Dick Chaney to FDR to Truman had questionable academic careers, he said.

“We ought to judge candidates on the whole arc of their lives, not just whether they showed up to English 101,” Brokaw said.

Brokaw said rather than his television work, his book, “The Greatest Generation,” proved his most satisfying project so far.

“It’s not about me,” Brokaw said of the book, a report on Americans born in the 1920s who faced the Great Depression. “I just open the door and say, ‘There’s something here we should pay attention to,’ and people responded magnificently to it.”

Students said they enjoyed Brokaw and found him “more than a talking head.”

“He was willing to talk about the corporation that owns the network,” said Ross Yelsey, a Medill freshman. “He wasn’t afraid to show his views.”