How television changed the cultural landscape
Television news started out as the bastard child of radio news and the film newsreel, and it was almost immediately disowned by those in the news business as superficial, trivial, and incomplete. Most print journalists either ignored or dismissed television news when it started its birth pangs in the late 1940s.
Radio gave television news the concept of writing for the ear in a conversational, easy-to-understand manner so that anyone who heard it only once could remember it. Print users could read and re-read a story for as long as they wanted to. Listeners only heard the news once and had to absorb the information quickly. Complicated sentences or concepts didn’t work.
Newsreels were the model for a visual presentation and the first TV cameramen practically all came from the theatrical newsreels, which were quickly being replaced by the new television medium. The problem was newsreels were expensive and time-consuming to produce and seldom if ever employed for breaking news – the life blood of TV news. When newsreels were not preoccupied with military stories (during wartime), they specialized in fluff: staged events, celebrity weddings, movie premieres, beauty contests, ship launches, animals doing silly things.
Many of the early television program formats were based on network radio shows and did not take advantage of the potential offered by the new medium. Newscasters simply read the news as they would have during a radio broadcast. Most of the time, the only visual was the newscaster reading on camera. Occasionally, there would be photos and limited video of news events.
Before the late 1950s and early 1960s, video TV cameras were too big and bulky to leave the sound stages. When cameras got smaller and lighter, television cameras moved into the local, county, state, and national communities and never looked back. Creating those smaller and lighter cameras was no easy feat. Broadcasters need equipment that is extremely rugged and versatile, can shoot in very low light and can handle wide temperature swings, day in and day out.
Today, one person with a camcorder or smartphone can write, direct, shoot and edit a video by deadline. Smartphone cameras have turned every citizen into a roving video reporter. But 60 years ago, a camcorder or smartphone didn’t exist, and only futurists dreamed of such a possibility.
In the middle of the 20th century, network news was something that great numbers of Americans relied upon and could share. It gave them a common set of facts upon which they could have discussions and debates.
Television brought major news events into the home, creating unforgettable moments that the public watched as one nation.
Television news was in its infancy when on April 8, 1949, Kathy Fiscus, a three-year-old girl in San Marino, CA, fell into an abandoned well. The way local stations covered the rescue effort became the blueprint for breaking news coverage that continues today. Until then, TV news was little more than “radio with a face.” Then came the 50-hour effort to rescue the child, 27 and a half hours of rescue efforts televised live by station KTLA in Los Angeles. There were few homes with television sets, so hundreds of people stood in front of store windows to watch the Fiscus rescue attempt on TV.1
Television made an “instant family of the nation.” Several TV reporters were involved in the live coverage, but the most prominent was KTLA’s Stan Chambers, whose open-ended, uninterrupted reports from the scene captured everyone’s attention. Until then, TV was considered a novelty and not taken seriously. The telecast changed that forever.
When the devastating news came that Kathy had died, the exhausted rescuers who had worked 50 straight hours openly wept. And a nation cried with them.
In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the four days of continuous coverage from Dallas – where he was assassinated – and Arlington – where he was laid to rest – proved that television was the only thing that mattered during a natural or man-made disaster.
Later, the captured-live-on-television shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby created the “grisliest first of this new era of TV news.” Millions of Americans watched a murder happen live as they sat in their living rooms.2 NBC was the only network to broadcast the live coverage, getting a scoop on an unforgettable moment of American history.
NBC devoted almost 72 straight hours to the assassination and its aftermath. “The immediacy of live television and the ability to learn of breaking-at-this-minute news was something that had never been experienced by Americans before – and something which pushed radio and television news reporting to new heights,” wrote one historian.3 An unbelievable 93 percent of American households with televisions were tuned in to watch the live coverage of the President’s funeral procession.
Vietnam was the first war covered by television, and its impact was staggering. A seminal moment in that coverage came in 1965 when reporter Morley Safer reported on U.S. Marines burning the village of Cam Ne, a turning point in TV’s realistic coverage of a war. For the first time in American history, the news from the front lines was brought straight into the living room, and historians called Vietnam “the first television war.” 4
The 1969 landing on the moon of American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in Apollo 11 was watched by more than 700 million who marveled at the astounding, live images they were seeing.5
The SLA Shootout in May 1974 was one of the most intense firefights in Los Angeles Police Department history. The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) was a radical group that had kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and had gone on a robbery, bombing, and murder spree. “The gruesome drama of a real police story played open‐ended on live television for nearly two hours,” wrote a New York Times reporter. “A portable camera of Channel Two KNXT, a local CBS television station, brought the shootout with suspected SLA members in south central Los Angeles into millions of homes. KNXT shared its camera with the NBC and ABC Los Angeles stations, and the evening news was devoted to the siege. Network news programs were canceled and the coverage of the shootout, live and in color, went into living rooms across the country. “The chaos and vividness of a major police operation, viewed incongruously from living rooms, was bizarre. Viewers were able to experience all the action vicariously as they heard Bill Diaz and Bob Simpson, the KNXT reporters, describe how it felt to inhale tear gas and dodge bullets. At one point, the television picture scrambled as viewers heard the reporters relate how they had just recoiled when bullets ricocheted past them.”6
The term ENG (Electronic Newsgathering or electronic journalism) was created by TV news departments who moved from film-based newsgathering to electronic field technology in the 1970s. It involved a single reporter with one video camera to an entire TV crew in a truck on location.
In 1986, the glory of America’s space program “turned into unfathomable heartbreak” when the Challenger shuttle exploded and broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing seven crew members including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. And millions watched it live.7
The rescue of Baby Jessica in 1987 reminded viewers of the Kathy Fiscus tragedy, but this time the result was triumphant. The successful 58-hour effort to save trapped Texas toddler Jessica McClure from a backyard well was a defining moment for CNN as viewers tuned in for the around-the-clock cable news channel updates.8
The from-behind-enemy-lines reporting of the Gulf War in 1991 by CNN’s Bernard Shaw, Peter Arnett, and John Holliman as bombs fell over Baghdad marked the beginning of live-TV war coverage.9
TV cameras in the courtroom caught every minute of the stunning climax of the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. The jury found the ex-football star accused of murder not guilty. Earlier, in 1994, the live coverage of a 45-minute slow-speed chase with a phalanx of police cars chasing Simpson’s white Bronco over California highways near Los Angeles was seen by 95 million viewers.10
On September 11, 2001, two hijacked Boeing 767s slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City, and the horrific footage shocked a nation. TV reporters helped steady shaken viewers during the continuous coverage, but off camera they were weeping, too. It was one of the darkest moments in American history.11
The coverage of news was changed forever when TV technically achieved the ability to cover the news live as it was happening. The internet has mostly replaced the excitement and immediacy of the live television news coverage on TV sets in the home that has dominated the news since the 1970s.
Smartphones and laptops are filled with live coverage from a variety of sources: professional newsgathering services, citizen journalists armed with smartphone and digital video recorders, special-interest videos that often send mis- or dis-information through video manipulation.
But when a human-made or natural disaster takes place, TV is still the one unifying video and audio medium that dominates a nation’s thinking. We still huddle as one when a live event takes place that is beamed into our homes uncensored, unedited, and filled with the excitement that only a live news event can deliver to all of us.
About the author: Joe Saltzman is a professor of journalism and communication, and director of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture (IJPC), a project of the Norman Lear Center, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. Saltzman was a senior documentary producer for the CBS owned-and-operated stations for more than a decade in the 1960s and 1970s and has taught at USC Annenberg for 55 years.
Featured photo: Kathy Fiscus
References
1. Terry Anzur, Inventing TV News: Live and Local in Los Angeles, 2022.
2. https://flashbackdallas.com/2018/11/22/the-jfk-assassination-and-television-firsts-1963/
3. Ibid.
4. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2018/01/25/vietnam-the-first-television-war/
5. https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/moon-to-living-room-apollo-11-broadcast
6. https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/18/archives/shootout-a-gruesome-drama-on-los-angeles-tv.html
7. Gunnar Matherly, The Challenger Disaster, History 153, August 19, 2015.
8. https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/30/opinions/baby-jessica-cnn-films-shorts-mark-bone-opinion/index.html
9. Barbie Zelizer, CNN, the Gulf War, and Journalistic Practice, Journal of Communication, Vol. 42, Issue 1, March, 1992. Pp. 66-82
10. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-oj-simpson-white-bronco-chase-20140617-story.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/08/us/judge-in-simpson-trial-allows-tv-camera-in-courtroom.html
11. Menahem Blondheim & Tamar Liebes, Live Television’s Disaster Marathon of September 11 and its Subversive Potential, Critical Studies in Innovation, Vol. 20, Issue 3, August 2010, pp. 271-276.
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