Jessica Birthisel | Sept. 15, 2009
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| Courtesy photo |
| Assistant professor Mike Conway’s new book looks at the earliest days of TV news, highlighting lesser known innovators. |
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Conway’s book, out this fall from Peter Lang Publishing Group, argues that it was a group of relatively unknown innovators, including Gilbert Seldes, Worthington Miner, Robert Bendick, Henry Cassirer, Leo Hurwitz, Chester Burger and Don Hewitt, who was responsible for creating a format that magnified television’s strengths as a unique visual medium.
Before this group at CBS, said Conway, stations such as NBC would simply point the camera at radio newscasters reading their scripts into microphones with no attempt at visualizing. Other programs featured little more than people sitting in chairs talking to each other. But the CBS group was the first to consider how visuals would help advance the understanding of the story, said Conway.
“Even with a small audience, they were very concerned about how the viewer received the information,” he said. “They considered each story on its individual visual potential. If they could use film, they would use film. If still pictures were the best way, they would use photographs. Usually, though, it was a combination of visual elements within each story.”
Conway said one innovation of this time was Rudy Bretz’s animated graphics system, called the “bretzicon.” It consisted of a map of World War II battle areas animated by people wearing black gloves who would move tanks, planes and other symbols on air.
As a doctoral student a decade ago, Conway was cued into the CBS group’s contributions after coming across a personal archive at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, which provided an insider’s view of the early work being done in television news.
“What this guy was writing was different than what I learned about Edward R. Murrow and the start of television news,” said Conway, adding that as a journalist, he was originally skeptical and wondered if the author was overplaying his and his colleagues’ role in the origins of television news.
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| Courtesy, Library of American Broadcasting, University of Maryland |
| Rudy Bretz with a small version of his animated map invention, “the bretzicon.” People wearing black gloves literally were the animators, moving items across the map. |
But as Conway came back to the topic off and on over the years, he says he found more and more evidence and sources supporting the idea that television news started in the 1940s among this particular group working at CBS above New York’s Grand Central Terminal.
“I realized, if these people really created the TV newscast, I’ve got to find them, whoever I can, and fast,” he said. Some of the key players already were dead as he began the project; in the 10 years since, even more sources have died.
The underlying theme in Conway’s text, that the origins of television news were earlier than many have acknowledged and that the people responsible were relatively unknown journalists, has been met with some resistance by other scholars and historians. Conway says that this resistance only made him work harder to find more archival items and capture more digital interviews with the people involved in order to back up his argument throughout the book.
Mike Murray, Conway’s colleague at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Television News, said in an e-mail that the book fills in an important hole in broadcast news history.
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| Courtesy Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin |
| While the viewer watches film of a news story, Chester Burger is tapping Douglas Edwards on the arm to signal a scene change, in order to keep Edwards’ live narration coordinated with the pictures in this May 1, 1947, CBS newscast. |
Murray also credits the book for its behind-the-scenes examination of what he calls TV’s diaper days. Conway’s own insight as a broadcast professional informs the book, he said.
“As a former news reporter and TV news director himself, he is able to give the reader very special, unique and interesting insight into how many of the ‘on-air’ innovations in television news evolved,” said Murray.
For Conway, the book is also important because of its parallels to today’s industry transitions to the Web. In the early days of the Internet, the first instinct was to take a newspaper page and put it up on a Web site just as it was, says Conway, rather than doing something new and different with the unique format.
“It’s always hard to fight existing media,” he said. “People who do this are trying to see the future, and they are often ignored or ridiculed.”
More:
- Check out the Video Vault to watch four of the innovators tell Mike Conway about their early days in TV news.
- Read about and watch video clips of Conway’s interviews with Walter Cronkite and Don Hewitt, pioneers who established much of the standards of television broadcasts.
