Ed Fouhy, a television news executive who won five Emmy Awards, worked at all three major broadcast networks and produced two presidential debates during a 35-year career in Washington, died on Wednesday in Chatham, Mass. He was 80.  The cause was cancer, his daughter, Beth, said.  He joined the “CBS Morning News” in 1966 as a field producer covering the civil rights movement and later served as bureau chief on the West Coast and in Saigon during the Vietnam War. He was the Washington producer for the “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite” from 1969 to 1974, when President Richard M. Nixon stunned the nation with his historic visit to China, fended off congressional challenges after Watergate and finally resigned.  Mr. Fouhy (pronounced FOO-ee) later served as Washington bureau chief and vice president for news at CBS, as a producer and deputy Washington bureau chief at NBC News and as Washington bureau chief and vice president for news at ABC, before returning to NBC in 1985 to start the newsmagazine program “American Almanac.”  After his network career, the Commission on Presidential Debates recruited him to produce the two debates between Michael S. Dukakis and George H. W. Bush in 1988 and the three among Bill Clinton, Mr. Bush and Ross Perot four years later. He was also the founding director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and the executive director of the Pew Center on the States, as well as the founder of Stateline.org, an online news service.  Edward Michael Fouhy was born in Boston on Nov. 30, 1934, and grew up in nearby Milton. His father, Joseph, was a payroll clerk at a shipyard. His mother, the former Mary Herlihy, was a medical secretary.  He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he began his journalism career filing sports articles for The Boston Globe. (A cousin was a local city editor.) While earning a master’s degree from Boston University, he switched to broadcasting and became news director of WBZ-TV.  He served in the Marine Corps from 1956 to 1959.  Besides his daughter, he is survived by his wife, the former Barbara Mahoney; his son, Mark; one grandson; and his sister, Nan.  In the 1990s Mr. Fouhy advocated civic journalism, which he defined as “reporting the issues on the people’s agenda even though they may not necessarily be on the journalist’s agenda.”  He specifically warned newspaper editors to fulfill their social responsibility to their readers. Otherwise, he said, “we stand a very good chance of becoming increasingly irrelevant, except as another form of entertainment where there are already many more attractive forms of entertainment.”  He did not spare network news. Interviewed in 2001 on “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” Mr. Fouhy said: “The evening news is essentially the same form now that it was 38 years ago when Walter Cronkite sat down for a half an hour in a studio in New York and introduced the correspondent pieces — 38 years of the same format. Now, I would say to you there are very few things in the world that are unchanged over the last 38 years, and particularly the audience that they’re broadcasting to. The audience is far, far different. The structure of family life is different, and the society is much more diverse.”  “When you look at the studies,” he continued, “people under 30 are going to the Internet for their news. If you don’t engage that generation, you’re going to lose them, because the people over 50, unfortunately, our mortality is pretty high.”  A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2015, on page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Ed Fouhy, 80, TV Newsman Who Sought ‘People’s Agenda’. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Mr. Fouhy worked for all three major networks as a producer and executive before becoming a critic of news organizations he viewed as out of step with their audience.