William Headline, from East Aurora, was CBS executive, helped start CNN
Died Oct. 20, 2008
WASHINGTON — William Headline, a veteran broadcaster who grew up in East Aurora, N. Y., and helped establish the CNN cable network as its Washington bureau chief for 12 years and headed the Voter News Service exit-polling organization during the contested 2000 presidential election, died Monday after a fall at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 76.
Mr. Headline, who was born in Cleveland but raised in East Aurora, was a longtime CBS News executive before arriving at the fledgling CNN in 1983. As bureau chief in Washington, he was pivotal in helping CNN establish itself as a credible news source in the nation’s capital.
Mr. Headline remained in the demanding role until 1996, when he became a CNN vice president managing special projects and pool assignments in which networks collaborate on news coverage.
As bureau chief, he was responsible for expanding the staff from 80 to 350 to cover Washington news and events. He also served as chairman of the Radio-Television Correspondents Association in Washington.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, who also was raised in Western New York, said Mr. Headline was “a decent person who understood the problems that journalists have and dealt with them in a compassionate way. As we used to say it, the best name in news.”
Mr. Headline, whose fitting name was Americanized by a Swedish ancestor, was a geology graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and a Navy intelligence officer before starting a journalism career.
In the early 1960s, he gathered polling information for Louis Harris and Associates in New York. He was hired by CBS in New York to help direct coverage of the 1964 presidential election and was promoted to a senior vice president of the network before moving to Washington in 1974 as assistant bureau chief.
He held that position for nine years, organizing coverage of political conventions, overseas presidential trips, papal visits and other Washington events. He was a network pool producer during President Richard M. Nixon’s 1974 resignation.
He left CNN in 1998 and spent two years as the executive director of the New York-based Voter News Service, a primary source of exit polling used by news organizations during the 2000 presidential election. That year, VNS data led networks to prematurely project Vice President Al Gore as the president-elect. Mr. Headline blamed faulty technology for inaccuracies in the group’s data.
After leaving VNS, he kayaked above the Arctic Circle and went river rafting in the American West.
