NBC4 in Washington will honor Jim Vance tonight, and you should watch
You don’t understand Washington if you don’t understand the man who embraced the city and its people for nearly 30 years
By Christoph Mergerson
WRC-TV in Washington is airing a tribute at 7:30 tonight to its beloved news anchor Jim Vance, who died last week. (UPDATE: You can click here to watch a replay of the tribute.) And you should watch it — particularly if your only significant exposure to Vance was the viral video of him and sports anchor George Michael laughing like whiskey-drinking asthmatics over a model falling on a catwalk in 2007.
It’s been said before, but it bears repeating, highlighting, and never forgetting: Jim Vance was a news anchor in one of the top television markets at a time when black men and women were, to understate the matter, not prevalent in broadcast journalism.

Perhaps we take that for granted in 2017, when we can turn on the news and see faces such as Lester Holt, Tamron Hall, Sheinelle Jones, and Joy Reid — and then dip into local markets and see Chris Lawrence and Lesli Foster in Washington, Ukee Washington and Natasha Brown in Philadelphia, Sade Baderinwa and Lori Stokes in New York, and Sally-Ann Roberts and Sheba Turk in New Orleans. Jim Vance and his contemporaries, such as Max Robinson, Maureen Bunyan, J.C. Hayward, and Sue Simmons, perfected their craft so that other black Americans might also have opportunities in the profession.
So I hope you watch the tribute to Vance tonight, because if you are a recent transplant to Washington, you may not understand what he meant to the millions of viewers who watched him tell the stories of our communities for 48 years — from the Air Florida plane crash, to the personal and political trials of Marion Barry, to flair-ups of violence in the city, and the tragedy of 9–11, to the unfulfilled promise of the local sports teams, to his personal story of overcoming addiction in a city where many others have experienced a similar affliction. Jim Vance’s story is a story of Washington, on many different levels.
Christoph Mergerson, a native of Northern Virginia who has lived in Virginia, Maryland, and the District, is a PhD student in media studies at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.
