Bill Wheatley is a former executive vice-president of NBC News and a onetime news director at WBZ-TV, Boston. He teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

At NBC, he had executive responsibility for the network's domestic and international news gathering and for its hard-news programs. He also served for five years as executive producer of NBC Nightly News and was closely associated with NBC's coverage of U.S. politics, overseeing the network's efforts in a half-dozen Presidential elections. He interrupted his career at NBC twice to study at Harvard University, as a 1977 Nieman Fellow studying American social history and as a Shorenstein Fellow studying Presidential leadership.

He holds a bachelor's degree in History from Boston College and a master's degree in Broadcasting from Boston University. He was born and raised in New York City, where he lives with his wife and two sons.