Vaudeville with Newsreels
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television Vaudeville with Newsreels By Reuven Frank ? ? April 20, 1939, David Sarnoff proclaimed television by opening the RCA pavilion at the New York World's Fair with the words,...
...At Good Morning America, the role eventually fell to Diane Sawyer, former Junior Miss America and alumna of the Nixon White House press office...
...But when the first Gulf War struck, CNN alone had reporters inside Baghdad describing live what was going on via the still new satellite telephone...
...Children watching the chimp would not let their parents turn off the set...
...A half hour later, Good Morning America host Charles Gibson interviewed him too...
...And in varying degrees they have come to fill most of their 24-hour cycles with something other than what just happened, was happening as we watched, or was about to happen...
...Few, even inside NBC, expected success when its flamboyant chief, Sylvester L. ("Pat") Weaver Jr., with great fanfare, gave us Today from 7 to 9 every morning...
...She is reunited with her fiancé, fined part of the cost of the search, gets a book deal and one for a TV movie—not to mention an hour-long prime time interview with Katie Couric herself, and even a plug on NBC Nightly News...
...It was cold feet after all...
...The AP asked an NBC executive for comment...
...Interviews featured celebrities, but of a certain sort...
...The competition for such interviews, initially between the two morning shows, and as the medium kept growing, also among channels and prime time "magazine" programs, became intense, bitter, sometimes slimy...
...In both programs, the ration of news steadily diminished...
...During the penultimate decade of the millennium, the television landscape changed...
...It seems likely...
...for the morning shows the figure is $100 million...
...As Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has observed: "The rest of the media, including the Washington Post, fee] they have to play along, because the story is creating 'buzz' and no one wants to seem clueless...
...A new owner infused money and imagination into ABC, lifting it to a par with the two older networks...
...In corporate hierarchy, sustaining the share price trumps journalistic ethics...
...Success on television can depend on things like that...
...Editing is "mediating," which can be made to sound evil...
...the reductio ad absurdum was the tale of the "runaway bride" of May 2005...
...The Internet is more "democratic...
...The troubles of older women, of men of any age, of minorities, receive passing reference if any But the Hall of Fame is graced by such as Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, JonBenet Ramsey, and now Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride...
...The rest is live interviews or live appearances by "guest" experts with opinions about the news...
...Things moved beyond "celebrity culture" to gossip, prurience, the new pornography...
...Untrained staff made production errors and established journalists scoffed at the "Chicken Noodle Network...
...The chimp mugged for the camera, scampered about the set, and was sometimes coaxed into sitting on the lap of the host, Dave Garroway...
...When Barbara Walters arrived the formula was altered...
...Meanwhile, American television had undergone another fundamental change...
...It was by such increments that the sum of human knowledge grew that morning...
...The animal and his two owners had just failed to get work on a children's program...
...Generally, the first six or seven minutes provide a reasonably good bulletin...
...A brochure explained how images from those boxy cameras went through the air to the top of the Empire State Building in Manhattan, and some 20 miles back to the small screens in front of us...
...Publishers learned a book is not a book unless someone talks about it on TV A producer boasted that by appearing on Today to push their latest production, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were seen by more people than had attended their plays in all the theaters they had run in...
...The 24/7 cable news hole, as newspaper editors call it, is 24 hours, but there aren't 24 hours of news...
...the bride almost always has cold feet and soon reappears...
...There has been a lot of attention lately to cable news' addiction to the troubles of young white women...
...While the jury is out for days in a celebrity trial, instead of using the opportunity to turn to weightier matters, cable news has lawyers come forth to guess what the verdict will be, others recapitulate details of the crime and the trial (the gorier the better), and interviews are held with the defendant's family and friends, no matter how distant, as well as self-anointed experts on states of the mind...
...Ratings were terrible, sales minuscule, I-told-you-so's plentiful...
...The producer hustled the group to the Today offices, where he convinced his superiors to add the animal to the cast...
...ABC was still a much smaller undertaking than NBC, and CBS was limited by occupying one of the morning hours with a successful children's program, Captain Kangaroo...
...The black and white pictures were fuzzy, and the song banal...
...Today host Matt Lauer had two other jurors—but by satellite, because they were still in California...
...EVEN when it plays to its strengths all-news cable succumbs to its weaknesses: trivialization, overemphasis, overexposure, occasional distortion...
...Pop music ruled outside their windows...
...At about the same time, cable evolved into an important part of television, introducing a multiplicity of program sources unimagined in the days of two or three or indeed four big networks...
...Reporters could cover proceedings from their hotel rooms...
...and a stuffed lion, seemed unable to get a purchase on a.m...
...Besides the news, books were promoted, culture was noted...
...The shows became vaudeville with newsreels...
...Once established...
...At Today it was in time Katie Couric, who at S15 million a year is surely the planet's highest paid purveyor of journalism...
...Their actual news is the same as the others', and at the same length...
...That was the ransom for letting all other cable channels go about their business without being hampered by a requirement to provide news...
...he said it was still enough forthe entire Sonnets from the Portuguese...
...That year's coverage of the quadrennial gatherings validated television for many who had scorned it, and for the press...
...The rest is "feature" material: sometimes fuller explanation, sometimes medical or other topics designed to appeal to their elderly audiences...
...anyone can comment...
...Not on all-news cable, however...
...Serious issues—poverty, nuclear annihilation, climate change, the decline of Europe—are given short shrift, or no shrift whatever...
...Everyone his own Sulzberger...
...No one need edit...
...rock bands held festivals...
...Up to that point, as stations were launched in more and more cities, television was pretty much a noon to midnight affair...
...Sheriffs from faraway counties are interviewed, as are psychologists who never knew her but "specialize" in these matters, and forensic scientists and lawyers and her pastor— whoever is willing to seek a little TV fame...
...Thenceforward, no news face would be content with a mere $990,000 a year...
...Then ABC had Sawyer talking to six jurors they had flown to New York from California...
...Ratings rose, as did sales...
...This pattern of all-news cable— there are now five national and numerous local channels—is having a debasing effect on every facet of American journalism...
...Cable could think in such terms because the number of possible channels was close to infinite...
...Both at CBS and NBC the "anchors"—a term not yet in use— of their convention coverage were chosen to anchor their nightly news programs...
...As cable expanded, so did thoughts of how it would handle news...
...But it worked...
...CBS, despite attempts with Walter Cronkite, Will Rogers Jr...
...Hence a lot of the gaping hole gets stuffed with talking rather than news, debating ratherthan talking, shouting rather than debating...
...If the number of possible cable channels is infinite, the number of potential blogs is infinity squared...
...Public television and several cable channels provide such a service...
...On Television Vaudeville with Newsreels By Reuven Frank ? ? April 20, 1939, David Sarnoff proclaimed television by opening the RCA pavilion at the New York World's Fair with the words, "Now we add sight to sound...
...The real New York Times once said it set the day's agenda for the country...
...Before long there was conjecture about the viability of an all-news-all-thetime channel...
...True, some people said they liked not being restricted to learning what was going on in the world at breakfast, supper or bedtime, but they really did not mean that any more than morning newspaper subscribers who say they want their papers delivered late...
...Morning television had arrived...
...Which brings us to the Age of the Internet—not exactly television but a physical outgrowth of its technology...
...Of course, they didn't sing...
...Finally, 25 years ago, a brash Southern entrepreneur named Ted Turner ventured into the unknown waters...
...This acceptance emboldened the networks to enter journalism...
...It can be seen as interposing an exterior will on the free gathering and appreciation of information...
...Afterward stations could move from experimental to commercial...
...The space newspapers give not only to the women themselves but to solemn critiques of the coverage shows how the aberrations of all-news cable have suffused American journalism...
...Early on, the industry got together and established several C-SPAN channels which essentially provided live coverage of the debates and proceedings of both houses of Congress...
...anyone can report...
...A young, attractive woman could perhaps have been kidnapped or raped or murdered...
...No one has yet called it a fertility cult...
...The secret...
...Those developments largely accounted for the morning shows taking primacy within the network news divisions from the supper newscasts, once the proud flagships of TV journalism...
...Early in 1952, in time for the next conclaves, NBC gave birth to morning television...
...Any police reporter knows to be wary of such assertions...
...She became the dominant "cohost," and even more so when ABC lured her away with TV news ' first million-dollar contract...
...Not long after ABC took its place as a major network, all three were bought by conglomerates, making each a relatively small subsidiary to be judged almost exclusively by its contribution to the bottom line...
...Thus in the early years Today had the field to itself...
...Cable news channels turned out to be a solution without a problem...
...There were few Cabinet members, fewer big name authors, no Nobel laureates...
...In 1963, the three network newscasts went to a half hour, where they remain...
...Weaver, who had mandated Today to raise the level of news on television—to be, he said without blushing, "the New York Times of the air"—hated the whole idea...
...On subsequent slow news days, though, the weakness of all-news cable was manifest: It served no glaring need...
...Also, unlike mostjoumalists, her professional andpersonal vicissitudes are chronicled in the National Enquirer...
...So it might be concluded that as a result of the expansion, or explosion, of television time devoted ostensibly to news, the effect has been not to provide more news but less...
...Then she calls the police in New Mexico, saying she was brought there by an abductor...
...Today was challenged by ABC's Good Morning America...
...Entertainers prevailed—movie stars, pop musicians, some from the stage...
...When a nightly news audience falls from first to second now, the drop could could cost its network $10 million...
...This despite the relentless overplaying and overreporting (and overspeculating) about real news, especially murder, mayhem and sex...
...Anyone can blog...
...Cronkite and, oh, so many more have since advocated an hour of news...
...Because World War II began that September, the miracle was put on hold until it ended...
...These days, the morning after the jury found pop star Michael Jackson not guilty of molesting the boys in his bed, Couric scooped ABC with the first postacquittal interview of his lawyer...
...In a small, darkened theater inside the pavilion the public peered into a brightly lighted studio where odd-looking cameras focused on a band accompanying three sisters singing...
...Today developed into a substantial source of information...
...What a wonderful world...
...Shortly, though, she confesses to having run away—a case of overburdened psyche—and hopes everyone will forgive her...
...When network nightly news programs still ran 15 minutes, Walter Cronkite, agitating for a half hour, famously measured an evening's script against the front page of the New York Times...
...Later that week questions were raised in the House of Commons because as the correspondents gave their reports, there had been a shot of a chimpanzee...
...Will that mean more news, or less...
...Following the practice of wartime radio, the newscasts were at the supper hour...
...In a suburb of Atlanta, a young woman about to be married was said to have disappeared...
...Any copyboy, leaning over the Associated Press machine waiting for the second revision of the third paragraph ofthat evening's story on the school budget, knows how essentially monotonous is the stream emanating from wire service printers...
...The other networks observed and followed...
...Seized stories may range from genuine tragedy through bathos to slapstick...
...Costs are rising, and the cheapest thing in television is a table and chairs...
...In the beginning, CNN was a novelty...
...The fare they presented was mostly wrestling, baseball, musical variety offerings dominated by Arthur Godfrey, and Tex (McCrary) and Jinx (Falkenberg...
...In the substantial time still left some news is reported as it happens, some is served up bulletin fashion, but most consists of seizing a particular event and covering it from every angle—especially if the story is lurid, in fact orpotentially...
...TV) For years, the Today presenters included a host—Garroway, John Chancellor, Hugh Downs, Frank McGee—a news guy, a second banana, and a "girl...
...Then, one day, a Today producer saw a chimpanzee in an elevator...
...So far, in the reams of newspaper copy deploring the phenomenon, there have been hints of submerged racism and at least one invocation of Jacques Derrida...
...NBC titles such segments "In Depth," CBS "Inside Story" and ABC "A Closer Look"—all implying their original handling of the subject had been superficial and inadequate...
...There are those who maintain there was more actual news at 15 minutes—12:20 plus commercials...
...Today had come a long way from June 1953, when the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II occurred while it was on the air and still pictures sent by radiophoto were shown as the voices of NBC correspondents described the proceedings...
...We are assured that the Internet will change news...
...The resident punditocracy entertains only the worst possible outcomes— concluding, for instance, from speaking to a friend, that she could not possibly have run off on her own...
...The other networks were not yet up to truly competing...
...Network TV, limited to the East Coast, began May 1,1948, in time for the national political conventions...
...Gradually, the "girl" became a feature reporter, then a news reporter, then an interviewer...
...but it was all rather miraculous...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
