Lloyd Robertson, legendary Canadian news anchor, dies at 92

Lloyd Robertson, the authoritative voice of Canadian television news for over four decades, died Tuesday evening at age 92.

Robertson joined CTV in 1976 and served as chief anchor and senior editor of CTV National News from 1984 to 2011 — the longest tenure of any national news anchor in Canadian broadcasting history. For 11 consecutive years, TV Guide Canada readers voted him the TV journalist they trusted most, a recognition he took seriously.

"Conferred upon you is this mantle of objectivity and fairness, and you have to take that seriously," he said in a 2001 interview. "And you're also aware in this business that as easily as you win it, you can just as easily lose it."

Robertson resisted the notion that anchoring was merely reading from a teleprompter. After two decades with the CBC, he left the public broadcaster in the 1970s because union regulations restricted CBC anchors to reading news without writing scripts or selecting stories. "I'm not a talking head," he told the Canadian Press. "Damn right it's important for me to be more than a talking head … I deal in the news every day. I ask questions. I do reports. I analyze. I edit. If that isn't being a journalist, what is?"

When he moved to CTV, the network promised him "total freedom." "You can write, you can go in the field and report, you can anchor, you will have freedom to do what you want to do," he recalled of a reporter. "It was irresistible, I couldn't turn it down."

Robertson began his broadcasting career in 1952 at a radio station in his hometown of Stratford, Ontario. He worked at a Guelph radio station before joining the CBC in 1954, later anchoring a reporter from 1970 to 1976. He spent time in Winnipeg and Ottawa before his long tenure at CTV.

Covering the September 11 terrorist attacks and its aftermath were among the most difficult stories he worked on. "I watched for a bit and realized this was horror," he recalled. When he described a memorial service in Ottawa a few days later, attended by an estimated 100,000 Canadians, he became emotional. "When I saw those people crying on Parliament Hill, and the monumental nature of this tragedy came home to me, I began to cry."

Robertson was named a member of the Order of Canada and inducted into the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1998. In 2007, he became the first journalist inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. He continued working for CTV as a special correspondent after stepping down from the anchor chair in 2011, handing the role to Lisa LaFlamme. He won lifetime achievement awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association in 2015 and the Canadian Journalism Foundation in 2016.