For the 142nd episode of the Journalism History podcast, Researcher Madeline Liseblad discusses the early days of television in the U.S. and how the format for local TV news that continues today was developed in the 1960s.
Madeline Liseblad is associate professor of journalism and public relations at California State University Long Beach. An award-winning journalism historian, Liseblad is on the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Specialist Roster and serves as chair of the Journalism History publications committee.
Transcript
Maddie Liseblad: What the consultants really did was that they connected the audience to television news. They gave the audience what the audience asked for, and it made television news understandable.
Teri Finneman: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew, and the ones you were never told. I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.
Nick Hirshon: And I’m [00:00:30] Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports.
Ken Ward: And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the Journalism History of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.
Teri Finneman: And together, we are professional media historians guiding you through our own drafts of history. Transcripts of the show are available at journalism-history.org/podcast.
This episode is sponsored by Lehigh Universitys Department of Journalism and Communication, inspiring the future makers.
Since the 1960s, [00:01:00] American television has used the same type of format to present the news. In this episode, we visit with Maddie Liseblad at California State University, Long Beach to discuss how local news developed and the role of consultants in creating the peopleization of news.
Maddie, welcome to the show. Let’s start out talking about the very first days of television in the United States. When did the public first see TV, and what was the state of television in the 1940s and [00:01:30] 1950s?
Maddie Liseblad: Thanks for having me, Teri. So the public first saw television at the New York World’s Fair in April of 1939. David Sarnoff, who was then the president of the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, introduced television, and the World Fair actually included the first president to be televised. President Franklin Roosevelt held the speech to open the fair. And this was really a birth of a new industry.
We had sound through the radio before, but now, [00:02:00] we had sound and pictures. Television was experimental initially. So, we first saw it in 1939, and in 1941, the FCC approved commercial television. Now, television was initially an entertainment medium, so it was a way to move goods, it was a way for advertisers to produce their products, and you could buy television sets from several manufacturers by the mid-1940s, but really, [00:02:30] the public didn’t really have television sets until the mid-1950s. We really saw like an 80% penetration of television sets by the late 1950s.
If we’re looking at news, the first newscast in the United States happened in 1941. We had two 15-minute daily newscast on a station in New York, so really, two years after television was introduced. But this was also seven years before regular network newscasts. [00:03:00] If we’re looking at the network, we really say 1948 was the birth of the networks, when they used AT&T to reach several connected U.S. cities. So in the 1940s, the 1950s, both at the network and at the local level, we saw efforts to advance evening newscasts primarily.
So for the networks, the DuMont Network, DuMont was a television set manufacturer that offered programming, [00:03:30] they had The Walter Compton News from Washington, D.C., we had the CBS evening news with Douglas Edwards, and NBC had the Camel News Caravan with John Cameron Swayze. In the 1950s, we also saw slightly elevation of the role of a television journalist. Initially, TV journalists were not viewed as highly as print journalists. But in the 1950s, we had some technological advances, so we started using the teleprompter. [00:04:00] Now, the teleprompter wasn’t invented for television news. It was coming out of the film industry, but the teleprompter allowed the anchor to look straight at the audience as they were reading copy. We also saw the first helicopters that were designed just for news.
So we saw a telecopter, the telecopter from KTLA here in Los Angeles. And then, by the end of the 1950s, television was really, had really taken off, but it was [00:04:30] still primarily viewed as an entertainment medium.
Teri Finneman: One of the most interesting findings, to me, of your study was discussing the disconnect between who TV initially catered to versus who was actually watching it. Discuss the influence of social class on television.
Maddie Liseblad: Yeah, so … So what took place in the 1960s was a really heavy investment in audience research. We had done audience research before, but in the 1960s, that really, [00:05:00] we focused on it. So part of this is that the FCC began requiring broadcasters to explain what measures they had taken to determine what they called the taste, needs, and desires of their audience. So we called this community ascertainment studies, so, because the license was, you know, you had to use it for the public good. Broadcasters now had to tell the FCC what the need in [00:05:30] that – in their viewing area was, and come up with a plan to address that need.
So in the early 1960s, news had what I call a medium of record structure. So kinda almost like a newspaper structure. It was very fitting for the upper middle class. Keep in mind that journalists were college educated, and they couldn’t necessarily always relate to the lower class, and that included the vocabulary that journalists were using. So sociologist, Lloyd Warner, [00:06:00] he has a diamond of social class model, and he started doing some of the early audience research, and he said that every society has a social class structure, and you can look at it as three divisions or at six divisions. So three divisions would be the upper class, the middle class, and the lower class. He divided it up into six divisions, though, so upper-upper class, lower-upper, upper-middle, lower-middle, [00:06:30] upper-lower, and lower-lower class.
And what he found when he started doing some of this audience research was that the middle majority was really ignored, and middle majority was almost 70% of the population, so you can’t really provide a public service if you’re only catering to, say, 25% of your audience, the college-educated set. So the middle majority was the lower-middle and upper-lower class. They had a high school education, [00:07:00] they had similar incomes, occupations, and lifestyles, and they really loved entertainment on television. The television was on a lot, but they didn’t really understand the newscasts. So the newscast would be on, but because it didn’t really speak to them, they didn’t understand it. So television as a medium was capable of reaching a mass audience, but the message needed to fit that audience, so once you tailor the message [00:07:30] to that middle majority, it drew a mass audience.
Teri Finneman: When most people think of television history, they think of the Kennedy assassination as a major turning point for showing the public why television mattered. How do you view the significance of that event for TV history?
Maddie Liseblad: It’s one of those milestone events that we talk about in media history class, for sure. So, it’s been described as television’s finest hour. We had four days of live coverage by the networks. It was really public service [00:08:00] of the highest order, and it brought people together, because this was a national tragedy so everyone was sharing that same tragedy. And one of the cases that I always bring in to class was Walter Cronkite reporting on the death of JFK.
This was the first time that he really came across the screen as a human being. He was tearing up, his voice was cracking up, he kept removing his glasses, putting them back on, and he came across as warm and caring. [00:08:30] There’s a term called parasocial interaction, and that’s the connection that the viewers feel that they have with the television personality, and that really came through in that moment. But it wasn’t just the JFK assassination that was significant in 1963. We also had the network evening news expansion from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. CBS and NBC did that. ABC was a couple years later.
1963 [00:09:00] was also the first time that the Roper poll, which is a nationwide public opinion survey, showed that television was the majority’s preferred news source, so people preferred turning into television news versus reading the newspaper, and things really started to change for television slightly prior to the JFK assassination, but this was definitely a turning point.
Teri Finneman: Yeah, let’s talk more about the 1960s because you talk about how it was such an important growth period for television. [00:09:30] Talk about the major historical moments that people watched on TV throughout the decade.
Maddie Liseblad: Well, this was such a visual decade and that, and we could have this conversation for (laughs) a couple hours just on the 1960s, so let’s just talk about some of the things that happened. We had the JFK assassination and the aftermath of that. We also had a couple of other notable deaths, so Robert Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, the Vietnam War, and anti-war protests, and Cronkite did [00:10:00] a lot of war reporting, too, the Cold War, the Space Race, and that culminated with the 1969 moon landing, and the moon landing was seen all across the globe. We had political unrest. We also had the first presidential debate on television, Kennedy versus Nixon, and the whole discussion about how Kennedy really was good on camera versus Nixon, that was kinda fidgety and was better for radio. [00:10:30] We had civil unrest, racial equality issues, including sit-down protests, Civil Rights Act, obviously, 1964, we had the Malcolm X assassination, and then Martin Luther King assassination, the Watts riots here in Los Angeles, the Stonewall riots, the Gay Liberation movement, and then we had the women in the Women’s Movement and the Feminist Movement.
Um, in 1963, we had both Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique [00:11:00] book and Gloria Steinem’s Playboy Bunny article. For sports fans, we had the first Super Bowl in 1967, we had the hippie movement, and the list (laughs) just goes on. There were so many visual happenings, or just the perfect decade for television.
Teri Finneman: Going off that, you mentioned that the late 1960s and early 1970s marks the beginning of a huge transformation and what’s been called the peopleization of news. What do you mean [00:11:30] by that, and what did it involve?
Maddie Liseblad: So in the 1960s, we saw a lot of what I call transfer of power from the networks to the local level. So we had a lot of local stations kinda wanting to own their own destiny in several different ways. So the West Coast drove the lengthening of the newscast, and the East Coast kinda drove the change of the television news format. So 1961, we have KCRA in Sacramento that provided the first extended [00:12:00] newscast. Keep in mind that the networks did not do a 30-minute newscast till 1963, so two years before, the networks expanded their newscast. We already had several local stations that had longer newscasts.
So, the peopleization of news is really a focus on the middle majority, which is at 70% of the U.S. population that we talked about before. So we started catering to the needs and wants of that mass audience. [00:12:30] We asked them what they wanted in surveys and in focus groups, and in many ways, the audience then, rather than being a bystander and just kinda looking in at the news, they became a participant, and we started tailoring news to the visual strengths of television. It became conversational, easy to understand. We had pleasant anchors.
You know, when we talked to the audience, they wanted anchors that were pleasant, that took that sting out of the daily [00:13:00] news. They wanted informative news, but also bearable news. We expanded the anchors to two news anchors, one sports anchor and one weather anchor. The audience said that they dislike politics, so we downplayed that. They loved news that they could use, and that included weather, so weather got a prominent spot.
They loved visuals. So if a story didn’t have good visuals, it was downplayed. We had two television news format that developed in the 1960s and [00:13:30] 1970s. The first was Eyewitness News, and depending on who you ask the two primary inventors, if you will, were Al Primo and McHugh & Hoffman. So 1955, this is when Al Primo said he got the idea for the Eyewitness News. He was out on a story, he was covering the story as a reporter, and there were some technical issues, and he had to step in front of the camera, and he says that gave him that ah-huh moment that, “Hey, I’m here, [00:14:00] and I’m showing my audience that I’m here, that I’m really an eyewitness to this event.”
Now, Philip McHugh and Peter Hoffman, known as McHugh & Hoffman, they used Lloyd Warner’s company for audience research. Lloyd Warner was the social class diamond model. McHugh & Hoffman have a sales background, and they teamed up with Storer Broadcasting – was one of the big broadcasting companies at the time, and they did [00:14:30] audience research and brought that audience research back into the newsroom and started making some changes. Primo and McHugh & Hoffman met up at WABC in New York in 1968, and that’s kinda where they crossed paths for the first time. So, the mid- to the late 1960s is the Eyewitness News format.
Now, in the 1970s, actually 1970 to be exact, we have another format called Action News, and that was pioneered by Frank Magid, [00:15:00] and he also knew of the social class diamond model because he had trained under a protégé of Lloyd Warner’s. Now, Frank Magid was primarily a researcher, but he kinda understood from doing this audience research what was needed, so he felt the Eyewitness News format was terrific, but it was too slow for the television medium, so he advocated up to three stories a minute. He [00:15:30] advocated short sound bites, maybe 10 seconds, quick video clips. He also liked live shots, again, because that shows that you’re out and about and you’re covering the event for your audience. He enjoyed snazzy graphics. He invested in technology, felt technology was really important, so if you’re making money, making news, then you need to invest that back into the news department. And he also had a lot of first-generation television reporters.
[00:16:00] So they really understood the visual aspects of television, and he had an overall young staff. By 1976, so really, six years after Action News, the two formats really had merged. You couldn’t tell which format was which, and part of that is because broadcasting is kinda like a copycat business. If something works, you borrow it. And then, by 1980, news was hugely profitable and, and stations started expanding newscasts [00:16:30] and really investing into their newscast. So for me, peopleization, really, it means bringing the audience into your programming, but it also means the expansion of news, because these formats required a lot of people on air, and so you needed a large staff to cover the news.
Teri Finneman: It was interesting to me, when I was reading your piece, that this development of the format for TV news actually took place in Philadelphia, [00:17:00] that it was Philadelphia that was a trailblazing site for the TV news industry, not LA, not New-New York. Uh, so is that something that you found surprising when you started looking into this history?
Maddie Liseblad: Yeah. It’s kinda interesting that it’s really what’s considered the start of both Eyewitness News and Action News. Now, Eyewitness News technically began at in Cleveland in 1962, and it was Al Primo, but he didn’t really develop it until he reached Philadelphia, [00:17:30] 1965. And the interesting thing about that situation in Philadelphia was that, normally, union roles require extra pay if you had any type of a body part on the air. So if you finger was showing in a clip, you had to be paid extra.
There’s even a larger fee if your voice was on the air, but in Philadelphia, Primo found a loophole in the union contract, [00:18:00] which meant that he could use the staff on the air without paying extra, and this was huge. So basically, overnight, he made everyone – almost everyone – an on-air talent, and that meant he had a big battalion of news reporters. He required his reporters to do stand-up. The only exception was funerals, basically, because he wanted to show, “Hey, we’re here. We’re covering the news for our audience, we’re eyewitnesses to what was going on.”
He gave them beats. [00:18:30] Um, he also did some interesting things, such as putting the set in the newsroom to show that they were busy covering the news. He added moving cameras for energy, and he was highly successful, so he was Philadelphia’s dominant number one news program in just 18 months after launching this Eyewitness News format. In 1968, he left for WABC in New York and, and he added some things there, [00:19:00] mostly marketing materials, so mic, flags, matching blazers, logo pins and things like that.
Now, Action News also started in Philadelphia. They started on the rival station to the network news station. It was a faster-paced newscast overall, but it was also a huge ratings success. And actually, this this was on WFIL-TV. This was the greatest ratings [00:19:30] expansion in TV news history, both if we’re looking at it at the network level and at the local level. So in a year, the station had more than quadrupled its audience, and WFIL was a highest-rated major market newscast for close to 30 years.
Teri Finneman: Your chapter talks about how the use of consultants began back in 1962 already, and in the decades since, has played a fundamental role in shaping TV news as [00:20:00] we know it, including the overemphasis on appearance of anchors, which I’ve done some critical studies myself of this problematic environment. There have been other critics of the content of newscast as well. Yet, as you note, the format for TV news isn’t just used in the United States, but around the world as the standard to use and, for decades, had huge viewership numbers. How would you judge the impact of consultants on journalism history?
Maddie Liseblad: Well, I certainly agree that there have been a lot of vocal critics [00:20:30] of the formats, and they were there from the beginning, but I also think that consultants in a way get a little bit of a bad rap, and that is a lot of times because the changes that they advocated are highly visual and that includes firing of people, right? You watch your favorite anchor one day, and then they’re gone their next day because the rest of the audience doesn’t like it. But what they did, what the consultants really did was that they [00:21:00] connected the audience to television news. They gave the audience what the audience asked for, and it made television news understandable.
It was also a format that was easy to implement and easy to adapt to market needs, and that’s why they were so highly successful globally, right, because it was an easy format to implement, and what they advocated worked. I mean, it drew mass audiences and it made news profitable, so [00:21:30] the consultants have had a huge impact on television news. They were everywhere. We can look at some of the things that they did that we dislike, but they did a lot of positive things, too. You know, ultimately here, especially here in the U.S., we have the commercial system, so we have to make money.
If we look at audience analytics today, it’s a given. We, for example, if you look at a website, we look at how people enter your website. We look at how people move around [00:22:00] on the website. We look at where they exit that website, right? If we didn’t need ratings and advertisements, they would have been no need for the consultants. But the big thing that they did was connect the audience to the television news.
Teri Finneman: As primarily a newspaper person myself, my industry has taken a lot of heat for not adapting enough to modern times, yet the format for television news has been virtually unchanged for 50 years on its own. Reports [00:22:30] have shown that broadcast viewership is falling now. Have we reached a point where the format of TV news needs to reinvent itself as well, or do you think it will continue with its own historical format?
Maddie Liseblad: That’s a really interesting question, and actually one that I’ve been pondering myself. So, television news still has a huge audience, but the audience even though it’s large, It’s aging, right? So at one point, that audience is no longer gonna be with us. [00:23:00] So the younger generation is definitely not tuning in. Appointment viewing, meaning you’re sitting down to watch the television newscast at 5 or 6, that’s largely dead because of streaming.
So the television news consultants, what they started is – the evolution of that is what we see today. Now, the TV news consultants are gonna argue that their concepts have been taken too far, that we’re seeing more entertainment than news today, and [00:23:30] that’s part of the issue. I was in the business in the 1990s, and, and sometimes honestly, I cringe at television news today. There’s a lot of team coverage, there’s a lot of chitchat, but ultimately, television news provides the audience what it wants. You know, stations have been trying to adapt on other platforms.
There’s a book chapter fairly recently that I wrote called Transnational Research in Television History. It’s part of the Routledge [00:24:00] Companion to American Journalism History, and in that chapter, I actually talk about that maybe it’s time to reevaluate how we do television news. We have to do something because if we don’t, that younger audience simply isn’t gonna be there, right? I also come from a public service background. I grew up in Sweden with Channel 1 and Channel 2 in public service, and so I highly believe in that information function of journalism and the watchdog function.
[00:24:30] There is a quote from former CBS News President Richard Salant, where he said, “News needs to tell people what they ought to know, not what they want to know,” and I bring that into my Journalism History class here at Cal State, Long Beach all the time, and we debate it. And I think that there needs to be a little bit of balance in, you know, providing people with things that they may not want to know about, but they need to know about, and also giving them what they want. For me, that information [00:25:00] function of journalism is really, really important. It’s hard to do in a commercial system, because you have to survive, but it’s pretty clear that television news needs to do something different because, at some point, that audience is no longer gonna be there.
Teri Finneman: And then, our final question of the show is, “Why does journalism history matter?”
Maddie Liseblad: I have a favorite quote from Robert McChesney. He says, “If you want to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’re coming from.” [00:25:30] And for me, journalism history is one word and that’s context, right? It provides context for today and a glimpse into the future. So journalism history matters because it tells us where we’re headed and why we’re headed in that direction.
Teri Finneman: All right. Well, thanks so much for joining us today.
Maddie Liseblad: Thank you for having me.
Teri Finneman: Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. You can also follow us on Twitter @JHistoryJournal. Until next time, I’m [00:26:00] your host, Teri Finneman signing off with the words of Edward R. Murrow. “Good night, good luck.”
Photo: Harris & Ewing, photographer. FCC Commissioners inspect latest in television. Washington, D.C., Dec. 1. The first public demonstration of the new lightweight television equipment was given today before members of the Federal Communications Commission. The new equipment is portable and can be carried in a taxicab as compared to the huge cumbersome truck which has been used until now. The FCC is now considering new renovations for commercial television. Left to right: Commissioners Frederick I. Thompson, T.A.M. Craven, Chairman James L. Fly, Commissioners Thad H. Brown, and Norman S. Case. Washington D.C. Washington D.C. United States District of Columbia, 1939. [December 1] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016884390/.
Journalism History journal 