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Studio 46 - Non-TPiR Discussion => Out In Left Field => Topic started by: Axl on January 29, 2007, 11:11:21 PM
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I thought some people might be interested in this. The analysis blog of CBS News put up a 1964 episode of the CBS Evening News... the entire show, commercials and all.
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite November 18, 1964 (http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/01/24/publiceye/entry2393743.shtml)
Those of you with a jones for TV history should find it interesting. You can occasionally catch a bad-quality snippet of an old show on YouTube, but it's neat to see a full-quality copy of an entire episode. As the blog entry suggests, the Good Ol' Days of TV news were really quite boring and interminable.
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In contrast to the tricked-out newscasts of today, with their lack of spin control and glitzy sets, the newscasts of the 60s would seem boring and interminable, but one had to live during the time (as I did) to appreciate it when it was on.
1964's technology was simply camera, film, and superimposed captions. And the two main choices at evening newstime was Cronkite on CBS and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC. In 1988, A&E replayed NBC's newscast of the day John F. Kennedy was shot. Prehistoric in contrast to 1988? You bet. But in 1963, we were transfixed to the TV for four straight days regardless.
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Not to mention the fact that the evening news used to contain about five minutes' less commercial time.
John
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Ccook wrote:
In contrast to the tricked-out newscasts of today, with their lack of spin control and glitzy sets, the newscasts of the 60s would seem boring and interminable, but one had to live during the time (as I did) to appreciate it when it was on.
But I think there's more to it than that. As was suggested in the blog entry, newscasts today are more engaging because of more than silly "swooshes" and lighting... reporters actually know how to tell a story these days.
In the episode shown, there were a handful of packages, but only three of them actually had on-scene footage of anything (one of those was a courthouse "gang bang" followed by a press conference). The other "reports" were actually just brief one-on-one interviews with no counterpoint and almost no context. Some of this could be attributed to technical limitations, but not all of it.
And for all the discussion these days about a lack of international context, there was only one international package... and it was about small bicycles supposedly becoming popular in London (a "trend" story featuring obviously-staged footage).
On the positive side, there were fewer commercials and a heckuva lot of stories... 20 to 25, I guess. But honestly, do you think anyone who watched that whole episode could remember five of those stories after they turned off the TV?
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Back then, no. Unless the lead-off story was something of great importance. And back then, local newscasts that came on prior were just a half-hour. Following the network news, it was pretty much entertainment fare, so we left our brains in drydock.
Today's evening news with Katie, Charles and Brian shows nothing much has changed. After they've wrapped it for the night, all bets are off as to what they talked about.
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I'd trade today's so-called newscasts for those of the 1960s and '70s any day. They may seem dry without swirling graphics, explosive transitional sounds and dramatic "live from the scene" reports, but the content then was more pristine.
The priorities of most contemporary TV news -- notably on local stations -- are entertainment first and journalism second. The reason for that? Broadcasters came to realize how much profit could be earned from television news. Advertisers pay a premium to have their commercials aired in a newscast because viewers will tend to accept their claims more. Also, compared with programming that requires a long shooting schedule and expensive scripts and actors, a newscast is a relatively inexpensive form of television to produce.
It once was that TV news departments were not expected to earn a profit. News broadcasts were considered a public service, kind of a "give bacK" to society for the privilege of having a broadcast license. But now, largely thanks to deregulation, that way of thinking has gone out the window. The temptations inherent in achieving maximum profits are at odds with most good principles of journalism. It has become more important for a "news show" to be enjoyable, entertaining and satisfying than to be responsible, informative and edifying.
As for advancements in technology, that is a double-edged sword. I think that during the past couple decades, there has been an inverse relationship between the quality of TV news and the number of whiz-bang tools used to create it.
Why is poetry, despite all its constraints, a more expressive form of literature than simple prose? The answer to this question correlates to what has happened to television news.
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Which is why evening newscasts go on for some two hours most everywhere and a station can't go a half hour without promoting their newscast with their "you have to know this" urgency.
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TVC wrote:
I'd trade today's so-called newscasts for those of the 1960s and '70s any day.
Referring here to the evening newscasts, you can go "back to the future" any night by watching The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Whenever I have conversations with people insisting that they'd watch an "old-fashioned" network newscast over what's on now, I ask them if they watch The NewsHour. If the answer is no, then the conversation is over.
Why is poetry, despite all its constraints, a more expressive form of literature than simple prose? The answer to this question correlates to what has happened to television news.
May I respectfully suggest that you have your analogy backwards. In the same way that the "constraints" of poetry can make the form more powerful, so too can the modern-day expectations of shorter length, relevant visuals, and emphasizing information that "matters" to viewers in news stories force reporters to do their work better.
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Ccook wrote:
In 1988, A&E replayed NBC's newscast of the day John F. Kennedy was shot. Prehistoric in contrast to 1988? You bet. But in 1963, we were transfixed to the TV for four straight days regardless.
I actually have this on video tape (A&E's re-broadcast, which A&E aired not as a prime time special but at the exact moment 25 years later).
This is fascinating stuff from a historical perspective. Prehistoric in contrast to 1988, definitely! At one point they have a correspondent in Dallas giving a report over the phone, a regular phone, and one of the anchors literally repeats, word-for-word, what the correspondent is saying, even as the correspondent's voice is coming through... they obviously didn't know he could be heard!
It would be great to have this on DVD.
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Gary Dunaier wrote:
Ccook wrote:
At one point they have a correspondent in Dallas giving a report over the phone, a regular phone, and one of the anchors literally repeats, word-for-word, what the correspondent is saying, even as the correspondent's voice is coming through... they obviously didn't know he could be heard!
Their man in Dallas (Robert MacNeil) actually couldn't be heard at first; NBC had major tech issues that day. That's why you always see CBS footage of the Kennedy assassination coverage instead of the other networks. I have tapes from all three networks, and CBS is the only one that comes off halfway cleanly.
ABC had phone problems that were almost as embarassing as NBC's. They apparently had only one phone in the entire studio... screwed into the wall next to the hallway door. So Ron Cochran had to stand in the unadorned corner of the studio in order to talk to their man in Dallas while stagehands scurried around him trying reset lights and cover the wall up with a curtain.
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ABC had a rather modest news operation in the 1960s. The network did not become competitive with CBS and NBC until the mid-1970s.
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On the other hand, NBC was the only network to carry the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald live. The CBS correspondent was on the phone trying to get the network to go to him, and ABC apparently wasn't there. Speaking of ABC's news operation paling in comparison to CBS and NBC back then, ABC didn't even expand the evening news to half an hour until about five or six years after the other two did, and they didn't have a morning show until the '70's (more than 20 years after "Today" started on NBC).
John
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The video that most people associate with the shooting of Lee Oswald came from the camera of NBC affiliate WBAP-TV. This station provided pool coverage from the county jail.
"When the News Went Live" (http://www.amazon.com/When-News-Went-Live-Dallas/dp/1589791398) is an interesting book about how television covered those horrific events from Dallas in November 1963.
PBS' Newshour has posted an oral history interview (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/kennedy/barker.html) with a former Dallas TV news director who recounts his experiences covering the assassination.
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TVC wrote:
PBS' Newshour has posted an oral history interview (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/kennedy/barker.html) with a former Dallas TV news director who recounts his experiences covering the assassination.
Ah, yes... Eddie Barker. He nicely deflects the question about Dan Rather in that interview given that he actually had Dan thrown out of his station during the assassination coverage, but that's a story unto itself.
As noted in the interview, Barker was the first person to actually say on the airwaves that the president was dead, but CBS didn't have an exclusive. Since KRLD was the pool at the Trade Mart, all networks had acccess. Because of technical limitations, his was the only live on-scene feed available immediately after the shooting. Both CBS and ABC happened to have him up as he reported the death. So both networks had the "scoop," but both quickly downplayed it until the official word came out.
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The video that most people associate with the shooting of Lee Oswald came from the camera of NBC affiliate WBAP-TV. This station provided pool coverage from the county jail.
WBAP-TV, today, is KXAS, an NBC O&O.
I have also saw the A&E special back in 1988, and one thing fascinating about it was it was all in black and white -- except for remotes from WBAP's news studio, which was in color.
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Axl wrote:
Ah, yes... Eddie Barker. He nicely deflects the question about Dan Rather in that interview given that he actually had Dan thrown out of his station during the assassination coverage, but that's a story unto itself.
Okay, you can't just toss that out and then move on. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I want to hear this!
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Sorry, Steve... I was afraid I was getting too far off-topic. Besides, always keep 'em wanting more, right? :-)
Rather was the CBS Southern Bureau chief at the time, and they were using KRLD as their base of operations for the presidential visit. A day or two after the assassination, Dan was looking into rumors (repeated to this day) that a group of Dallas schoolchildren had "cheered" when they were told that the president was dead. As Barker noted in the interview TVC linked, the line being pushed by many national and international reporters at the time was that Dallas was a right-wing hellhole that had collectively "killed" Kennedy.
Dan passed the story on to Barker, who looked into it and determined there was nothing to it... at most, a few young kids were happy that they were getting a day off from school and didn't really understand what was going on. To make a long story short, Dan did the story anyway, and Eddie was so furious he threw the entire CBS News staff out of the building.
After about a day, facing the threat of losing their affiliation and the fact that the CBS guys (by Rather's own admission years later) had stolen quite a bit of their footage on the way out, KRLD let them come back. Still, I have a tape of a roundtable discussion with the KRLD guys taped a few years ago, and they literally applauded Eddie at the memory of him throwing out Dan Rather. :-)
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The Kennedy assassination happened at a time when many CBS affiliates in the South, especially Texas, complained bitterly and often to the Network about the News Division's coverage of civil rights issues. It is not surprising that the Dallas affiliate resented "one of them northern boys" treading on their turf. The irony, of course, is that Dan Rather is from Texas.
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TVC wrote:
The video that most people associate with the shooting of Lee Oswald came from the camera of NBC affiliate WBAP-TV.
From a "primitive technology" aspect, one of the most fascinating parts of that footage is how the camera went from a wide shot to a close-up... the cameraman had to turn a dial or a knob to switch, instead of just zooming in (is it reasonable to presume TV news cameras back then didn't have that function?)... and the switch from wide to tight occured just a few seconds before Oswald was shot.
Imagine if the cameraman had waited those few seconds before going for the close-up...
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Through the mid-1960s, studio camera designs tended to use turret lens assemblies. Lenses of various fixed focal lengths could be attached to the turret. The idea behind this is that a fixed focal length lens provides a better image than a Zoomar ("zoom") lens of variable focal length.
Some cameras were equipped with three fixed focal length lenses (wide, medium and close-up) and one zoom lens for flexibility. But as optics technology improved, studio cameras were designed to use only a single zoom lens -- either one that is integral to the camera and enclosed in a shroud, or is attached separately to the camera body.
Want a fun way to consume a couple hours of your valuable time? Check out the RCA studio cameras on this web site (http://www.oldradio.com/archives/hardware/TV/RCA-TV.htm).
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Gary Dunaier wrote:
...and the switch from wide to tight occured just a few seconds before Oswald was shot.
Imagine if the cameraman had waited those few seconds before going for the close-up...
Actually, the "turret" takes place as Ruby lunges, and the video returns at literally the exact moment he pulls the trigger. I've even heard some extremely weak conspiracy theories on that (they were trying to hide the truth!) from people who obviously don't know anything about cameras, aren't aware that the CBS/KRLD coverage never turrets, and that there is plenty of extant film footage from other sources showing the whole thing.