Longevity Legend, Dean Of Television News PIX TV’s Marvin Scott Is All Of That and More

By Bob Nesoff

There are few areas where  change is more often than putting on a pair of clean undergarments. Journalism, and especially television news is at the forefront. Restaurants open today and are gone tomorrow. Your favorite television news reporter is suddenly gone from the station you watch and either turns up on another or has moved out of town.

But for one television journalist, 45 years with one station? That’s fodder for the history books.

Marvin Scott, winner of multiple Emmy Awards, a soft-spoken journalist, is arguably the only one who can lay claim to that record. And we aren’t counting his previous television locations prior to joining New York’s PIX 11 as a reporter, anchor and special events newsman. Scott first walked into what was then called WPIX and was affiliated with the New York Daily News.

Of course, there was “grunt work,” but he never sat back and gave it short shrift. Even story. Every interview. Every person or assignment was as important as speaking with an important personage. He gave the same respect to a John Doe as he would have given to Golda Meier, Yitzhak Rabin, Martin Luther King and Yasser Arafat. Oh, wait a minute. He did actually have one-on-one interviews with each of them.

But he didn’t stick to political figures known throughout the world. He mixed words with the King of Comedy, Jerry Lewis. For this interview, Marvin was awarded an Emmy.

 He is so well-known that when the book, “The Amityville Horror,” was written, although author Jay Anson had him meeting at a pizzeria with the former residents, George and Kathy Lutz, it never happened. But he did spend a night in the house with psychics and demonologists, nothing happened.

His career began, ironically enough, in the same building he has worked in for four decades when, as a teen-ager who enjoyed photography, he had photos of a burning building. He brought them to the offices of the Daily News and sold them. A career got off to a “hot” start with pictures of the burning building.

He’s come a long way since. He is PIX 11’s senior correspondent. For 27 years he was anchor/host of “PIX 11 News Closeup.” In earlier years he anchored the station’s Independent Network News “Midday Edition and “USA Tonight Weekend Edition,” both nationally syndicated programs. He spread his abilities to cover such events as the Columbus Day and Puerto Rican Day parades in New York City. He was on hand to cover Op Sail 92 and many others.

Prior to joining PIX 11, Scott was a reporter/anchor at WNEW-TV. He had a brief stint as an anchor at CNN when it first started in 1980. Previously he was affiliated with WABC-TV and the Mutual Broadcasting System. While there he covered America’s space program. 

He scored an exclusive interview with Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is now a permanent part of the archives at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald is said to have set up his sniper’s nest.

Far from the streets of New York, he spent time in Iraq, Cambodia and the Middle East where some correspondents were known to sit back and do their stories from press handouts. Scott could not do that and he was known by the troops on the front-lines as he stood there with them. He even spent five Christmases with the front-line troops.

“That was the proudest achievement of my career,” Scott said. I was able to bring a taste of New York with bagels, cheese cake and hot dogs to our local troops and put them on live TV so they were, able to speak with their families via satellite.

A hands-on reporter, he actually flew in an F-16 fighter jet with the pilot pushing the plane to 9Gs. That’s nine times the pull of gravity. Going thousands of feet into the air with the jet, he also was aboard a nuclear attack submarine deep under Long Island Sound. On solid ground, he was honored by the New York Stock Exchange when they asked him to ring the bell signaling the close of trading.

A graduate of New York University, Scott has a truck load of professional honors. He is a member of the New York Broadcasters Hall of Fame and has been cited in the Congressional Record “For responsible reporting of urban riots. The Associated Press Broadcasters honored him for his reports on the Three Mile Island Nuclear disaster. 

He was named a recipient of the Terry Anderson Award for Professionalism in Journalism. The award was named for the Associated press correspondent held captive for eight years in Lebanon.(The award was presented to him by this writer who was president of the Working Press Association of New Jersey).

Born in The Bronx, he has been honored with installation in “The Bronx Walk of Fame.” Marvin Scott received  honors from the American Bar Association, Aviation Space Writers Association, New York’s Finest (Police) Foundation and the Cops Foundation. He has received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for Distinguished Americans and in 2001 was inducted into the Silver Circle of the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. The list could go on. 

He is also an accomplished photographer whose work has been exhibited in several galleries. One photo he took of JFK is now in the Library of Congress.

He has been nominated for more than 50 Emmy Awards and was the recipient of 13 of the coveted statutes. He has chronicled his career in an award-winning book: “As I Saw It—A Reporter’s Intrepid Journey.”

His son, Steven, is sort of following in Marvin’s footsteps. He is both a comedian, and actor as well as a TV host. His daughter, Jill, worked briefly as a TV reporter at Cable station New York1. Marvin and his lovely wife, Lori, live in New Jersey within easy commuting distance to his studio and all the exciting events in the Big Apple.

Marvin Scott generously provided all the photos included here.