Jessica Birthisel | Aug. 31, 2009
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| Courtesy photo |
| Assistant professor Mike Conway, right, interviewed CBS legend Walter Cronkite in the broadcaster’s offices in late 2005 about the early days of TV news. Conway’s book on the subject will be published this fall. |
In the coming weeks, Peter Lang Publishing Group will release Conway’s book, The Origins of Television News in America: The Visualizers of CBS in the 1940s, an in-depth look at the development of the television newscast from approximately 1941-1948. A second project, the article “The Extemporaneous Newscast: The Lasting Impact of Walter Cronkite’s Local TV News Experiment,” is set for the summer issue of the journal American Journalism.
Both Cronkite and Hewitt shaped television news. Cronkite, who died July 17, served as anchor and managing editor at CBS for a generation, covering major cultural events such as the Vietnam War, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the moon landing and Watergate. At the time of his death Aug. 19 at 86 years old, Hewitt still was working as a producer-at-large. He’s best known for creating the landmark television CBS show, 60 Minutes, which he produced for 40 years.
Conway interviewed both men when researching material for his forthcoming book and article.
“Cronkite was an accidental television pioneer,” said Conway. Like many, Cronkite worked in radio, but when he moved to TV, he looked directly into the camera, not at a script, and talked to his audience. “He knew the news so well, he could do the broadcasts extemporaneously.”
It was this unique area of inquiry that helped Conway secure his 2005 interview with Cronkite in the broadcaster’s CBS office in Manahattan.
“His staffers told me that when he found out I wanted to learn about his early days on television in D.C., he got excited about it,” said Conway. “And he was genuinely excited to talk about it.”
During the interview, Cronkite told Conway that in those early days, he made very brief notes to himself before a broadcast, taping them to the back of his nameplate so they could remain hidden from the camera.
“What I did was just to write proper names that I might not be able to remember, or distances, or something where I need to have the exact number,” said Cronkite on the video interview Conway shot. “In that case, I wrote in very small type. I couldn’t even see it today with these glasses, but in the smallest type. When I needed the name, or number, I could glance down quickly and get it.”
As Conway describes him, Cronkite was an authoritative media presence, but also a compassionate one. By looking directly into the camera, Conway writes in the article, Cronkite could connect with the audience immediately. And even when Cronkite moved on to larger, national audience, he never lost that gift when it came to live news coverage, says Conway, something that helped him rise to such levels of success.
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| Conway’s book looks at the early years of television news and the innovators who shaped the medium. |
As soon as Conway decided to seriously pursue these origins of broadcast news, he went quickly to work scheduling interviews with the members of this CBS group. Some already had died by the time his project began. Conway interviewed Hewitt in 2003.
“He was this amazing force,” said Conway of the man who joined CBS in 1948, about the time Conway’s book leaves off. “He came up with so many of the things that really are conventions in broadcast journalism today.” Some of those conventions include the use of names on screen under interviews and concepts and terms such as A-roll and B-roll.
“He was working and coming up with ideas until the day he died,” said Conway.
Conway’s book fills in an important gap in broadcast news history, says Mike Murray, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Television News.
“It addresses very important ‘unsolved mysteries’ concerning television’s early development,” he said in an e-mail. “This makes a tremendous contribution to the literature, particularly by way of filling in many of the gaps about what we know took place and who was ultimately responsible.”
For Conway, the book is also important because of its parallels to today’s online industry transitions.
“It’s always hard to fight existing media,” said Conway. “People who do this are trying to see the future, and they are often ignored or ridiculed.”
In their own words:
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- Clip 1: "…this funny stuff on television…" (10.59MB)
Cronkite was hired by Edward R. Murrow in 1950 to cover the Korean War and helped develop the newscast at WTOP television in Washington, D.C., while he waited to go to Korea. But Cronkite did so well on the newscasts that CBS did not want to send him to Korea. Cronkite was so upset at being assigned to "this funny stuff on television" that he took the train to New York to see CBS president Frank Stanton. In this clip, he recounts the meeting. - Clip 2: The process (7.12MB)
When Walter Cronkite started in television at WTOP in Washington, D.C., in 1950, he did not read from a formal script. Instead, he immersed himself in the news all day and then delivered the news extemporaneously, a feat rare then and today in a television newscast. Here, he tells about that process, including his need for just a little bit of paste. - Clip 3: Ernie Pyle (7.82MB)
Cronkite talked about the life and times of the famous World War II correspondent, including the difficulty Pyle had in getting his work from foxholes on the battle lines to transmit for publication. "But when he got it out, it was a peach," Cronkite says. - Clip 4: Don Hewitt (2.94MB)
Don Hewitt described his transition from Acme Pictures to CBS. It was 1948, and "those little pictures in a box" were proving to be much more than just a fad.
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