TV News: Its Birth and Infancy

No one will ever forget the dreadful images of September 11, 2001.

Drawn to the nearest television by a phone call or a shout from a co-worker down the hall, Americans and viewers around the world stared in disbelief at the billowing smoke coming from the World Trade Center's North 110 Floor Tower. But nothing could prepare them for the shock that came moments later as United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the complex's South Tower. Within an hour and a half, both towers were no more than a gigantic tomb of rubble for thousands of dead and missing.

As I struggled with the same mixture of grief and outrage shared almost universally by people everywhere, I was struck by the odd thought that because of television, so many people saw history being made -- live -- as it happened.

Sure, plenty of people have seen history-making events before on the evening news, but usually as a replay filmed or taped earlier in the day. Many events, such as the moon landing or the presidential elections, although broadcast live, have been scheduled in advance. Other newsworthy stories, such as military actions and natural disasters, are of such a long duration that getting pictures to the public isn’t that much more of an accomplishment than movie theater newsreels of the 1930s and 40s.

The attack on the World Trade Center was different. It was live spot news of an immense proportion. It delivered something that other media -- newspaper, radio and internet -- couldn’t deliver: the actual, history-making image as it happened. It’s no wonder that we instinctively reach for the remote in times of crisis.

Television news is ubiquitous. The other evening the restless insomniac that I am awoke at 3am and stumbled to my television set. Interspersed between reruns of “Matlock” and better-buns-and-abs infomercials were two network news broadcasts, one local broadcast, and a CNN re-feed on a bargain-basement UHF outlet. And that was just the over–the–air channels.

Taking a glance at my TV guide, I noted that a cable–connected news junkie could have scored a fix with CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. A commercial-induced withdrawal could be curbed by flipping over to "the niche news channels" like CNNFN, CNNSI, Court TV, Empire Sports Network, ESPN, ESPN 2 and the Weather Channel. Finally, the news junkie could come down from his information-overloaded high and be lulled to sleep by unedited highlights of the day's conferences and speeches on C-SPAN 1 & 2.

It’s almost hard to believe (or remember, as the case may be) that things weren’t always this way at all. Throughout the 20s, 30s and most of the 40s, television was little more than an experimental curiosity indulged in by educational and industrial organizations and a small group of wealthy viewers.

It’s not that people didn’t recognize the potential of the new device. Chairman of RCA David Sarnoff remarked in 1939, "The emotional appeal of pictures to the mass of people is everywhere apparent. (Kisseloff, 349-50)" But if the medium of television was ever going to find mass acceptance, it was going to have to broadcast something more intriguing than fuzzy pictures of Niagara Falls on an intermittent basis.

The development of a viable commercial television system was slow in coming to the United States. Not surprisingly, World War Two brought serious progress to a halt (Abramson, 31). But post-war television was hardly a boom–time, either: much time was spent fighting government anti–trust regulation, industry bickering over frequencies and competing standards, and, most importantly, in the minds executive boards everywhere: just how was this going to make any money (Boddy, 37-41)?

1948 is widely regarded as the year that broadcasters and the public really jumped head first into the ocean of commercial television. Television networks and stations met the public’s eager demand for shows with a variety of live programs: theater plays, musical showcases, stand–up comedy, soap operas and yes, news and public affairs programming.

The 1948 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia was broadcast to nine states via “stratovision” -- whereby “the signal was beamed up to a plane flying 25,000 feet above Pittsburgh… (Wilk, 97)” Following the critical acclaim of those broadcasts, the TV networks were eager to get involved with a regular schedule of news programs.

Douglas Edwards, known within the radio industry as more of an announcer than a reporter, was the face of CBS TV News. But what passed for network news in those days bares little resemblance to today’s spectacles. “…the Edwards show of those early years hardly even qualified as a television newscast. There were no television correspondents in the field and no network camera crews to film the stories. Except for wars, floods, and other catastrophes that, because of their duration retained a certain timeliness, there was little attempt to cover spot news. About 90 percent of a typical Edwards broadcast consisted of Edwards reading the news.” (Gates, 56)

NBC’s Meet The Press took advantage of early TV’s studio–bound limitations and became the longest-running news program on the air. A simple format, still followed today, consists of a few interviewers grilling a public figure on the important events of the day. Some notable guests of its first decade included Menachem Begin, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro (Ball).

NBC’s entry into broadcast news is perhaps today remembered more for its sponsor than its content. The Camel News Caravan, hosted by the folksy John Cameron Swayze, made extensive use of newsreels (Bliss, 222-3). While the footage wasn’t always of the timeliest variety, it was at least a step in the right direction, playing towards the strengths of television broadcasting.

Other notable broadcasts of the first decade of television news included Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now, The Today Show (which accomplished the impossible feat of getting people to watch news in the morning -– even if it took a monkey to do it!), and CBS Reports. Of particular note is ABC’s unprecedented and uninterrupted coverage of the McCarthy hearings, viewed by over 80 million people (Streitmatter 168).

“Calling ABC’s televising of the hearings an act of enormous public service, Jack Gould wrote in the New York Times: ‘No viewer sitting in front of his screen can be unaware of the television’s tremendous role in the hearings – politically, educationally and socially. The television audience constitutes the real jury. Whatever the viewer’s personal political predilections, he is his own eye-witness, reporter and judge.” (Streitmatter 165)

In just a few short years the growth of the television industry forced its “big-brother,” radio, out of the general entertainment category and into a mostly local record–based format that it still, more or less, follows to this day (Emery 376). It kept audiences in their living rooms and out of the movie houses and live entertainment venues (Emery 393-5). It even began taking a large dent out of newspaper and magazine advertising revenue eventually resulting in the cancellation of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s (Emery 387).

With the increased audience and subsequent rise in revenues, funds were readily available for the development of new technologies that directly benefited news production: the Teleprompter -– which allowed anchormen to read their script without breaking eye–contact with the camera, color, magnetic sound, and coaxial connections from coast–to–coast that allowed networks to broadcast live news events to every affiliate at the same time (Kisseloff, 373).

“In 1947, only 1 percent of American homes had a television.” (Streitmatter 159) The 1950s saw television make great inroads with the American public. In 1952 “more than 34 percent of the homes -- fifteen million -- had television sets. By the end of the decade this figure was 86 percent.” (Emery 370) But the ubiquitous box in the living room was soon to be more than the trendy appliance to have.

Within fifteen years of its commercial inception, television news was no longer a novelty or hit–or–miss experiment in progress; it was a necessity for a nation in crisis. As Fred Friendly, then head of CBS News, recalled in the book Television:

“Those four days of massive television coverage of the Kennedy funeral held the nation together. A nation which had a forty-year old president shot from under them was in danger of disintegrating in an emotional tantrum...

"I think it was broadcasting's finest hour. And I think it might have saved this country... People at all three networks made the decision: no commercials, and more important, no entertainment programs. Television was for those four days the sinew, the stabilizing force, the gyroscope that held the country together.” (Winship, 218)

WORKS CITED

Abramson, Albert. "The Invention of Television." Television: An International History. Ed. Anthony Smith. New York: Oxford Press, 1992. 13-34.

Ball, Rick & NBC News. Meet the Press: Fifty Years of History in the Making. New York: McGraw–Hill, 1998.

Bliss, Edward Jr. Now The News: The Story of Broadcast Journalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Boddy, William. "The Beginnings of American Television." Television: An International History. Ed. Anthony Smith. New York: Oxford Press, 1992. 118-147.

Emery, Michael C., Edwin Emery with Nancy L. Roberts. The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media.
Needham Heights: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Gates, Gary Paul. Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News.
New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

Kisseloff, Jeff. The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961.
New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Streitmatter, Rodger. Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History.
Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.

Wilk, Max. The Golden Age of Television.
New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.

Winship, Michael. Television. New York: Random House, 1988.