Bob Abernethy, Longtime Host of PBS Show on Religion, Dies at 93 He conceived and produced “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly” and was its face for 20 years, after four decades as an NBC News correspondent. Bob Abernethy in 1961. He spent four decades as a national and international correspondent for NBC before becoming the host of PBS’s “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.”Credit...Art Selby/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images May 6, 2021 Bob Abernethy, who capped a four-decade career as an NBC News correspondent by injecting religion, one of the most under-covered subjects on television, into national programming with a weekly series that ran for 20 years on PBS, died on May 2 in Brunswick, Maine. He was 93.