Ch 9 Television

This chapter covers the development of television from the earliest visions to the effect of broadband streaming on the markets.

TV on this site

Philo T. Farnsworth directs an early TV production. (University of Utah).

• Political advertising on TV
• Commercial advertising on TV

Discussion questions

1. Politics: Was television more partisan in previous generations?  Why or why not?
2. Fairness: Should we bring back the Fairness Doctrine, as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggests?
3. Deregulation: How much has deregulation changed the structure of broadcasting?
4. Social responsibility: Compare Edward R. Murrow’s 1958 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters to John Stewart’s 2010 speech at the “Rally to Restore Sanity.”  How did both approach the idea of the usefulness versus the misuse of television?

People and events

Philo T. Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworkin, David Sarnoff, Newton Minow, Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Sean MacBride

Sputnik, vast wasteland, quiz show scandals, Checkers speech, presidential debates, Vietnam coverage, WLBT case,  public broadcasting, restrictions on tobacco advertising, satellite TV,

Documentary videos

1. The Cold War, an epic 24-part CNN documentary. Recommended: Episodes 8 (Sputnik) and 22 (in which exposure to popular culture and foreign media raises expectations in the former Soviet states).
2. Good night and good luck : the Edward R. Murrow television collection — CBS Broadcast International. Includes See it Now, Person to Person, Harvest of Shame and news clips from the McCarthy era.  Highly recommended.
3. Walter Cronkite: Eyewitness to History — CBS and A&E  documentary
4. Television: Window to the World / History Channel,  Modern Marvels series, 1997
5. Dawn of the eye [videorecording] / production of CBC Television in co-production with BBC
6. Control room – 2004 — A documentary on perception of the United States’s war with Iraq, with an emphasis on Al Jazeera’s coverage.
7. OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism — 2004 — IMDB:  Documentary on bias of  Fox News Channel (FNC); Material includes interviews with former FNC employees and the inter-office memos they provided.
8. Sputnik Fever — 2007 — Documentary looking back at the USSR’s Sputnik satellite and its effects at the time and over the last 50 years.
9. Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame documentary, 1960http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJTVF_dya7E

Merely wires and lights in a box … Murrow’s 1958 speech

A speech by Edward R. Murrow to the Radio TV News Directors Association (RTNDA) convention in Chicago, October 15, 1958, is one of the highlights of television history and still resonates today.  One particular thought is widely quoted:

“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful. “

 There are many other interesting ideas in the speech, for instance, the basic nature of the U.S. television news system:

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles..

Another part of the speech reflects Murrow’s experience dealing with the anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s.

I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and more mature than most of our industry’s program planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. I have reason to know, as do many of you, that when the evidence on a controversial subject is fairly and calmly presented, the public recognizes it for what it is–an effort to illuminate rather than to agitate.

The RTNDA celebrated the 50th anniversary of the speech with a three-day conference, a a web blog,  and with pages of photos and audio from the speech.  It’s important to note that in 1958, Murrow’s speech did not get a warm reception.   Ellen Hunt writes:  “his bosses at CBS … were angry.” They thought they were being attacked by someone they had protected.  And yet these days (2008), Murrow’s speech evokes a much different reaction because so much of what he said is still relevant, she said.

The speech has become something of a touchstone for modern media reform advocates:

1. John Stewart’s speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity, 2010, is a take-off on the lights in a box speech; also see text at Rolling Stone
2. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather,  referring to Edward R. Murrow’s 1958 “lights in a box” speech, says in Nov. 2011: “We must untangle the wires from the lights. We must halt the steady decline of broadcast journalism and the endless compromises to the boardroom.”
3. Steven Barnette, writing in The Guardian, talks about the impact of the speech in this 50th anniversary article.

MORE Television Links

Early years 

1. Early years of TV in the UK — BBC Witness program
2. This I Believe with Edward R. Murrow
3. Nixon Kennedy Debates
4. Political ads on television:
5. Confrontation between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, 1970
6. William F. Buckley debates Gore Vidal, 1968; A fascinating and heated exchange about free speech and the police riot at the Chicago democratic convention.
7. Newton Minnow and the Vast Wasteland 
8. Roderick P. Hart and Mary Triece US Presidency and Television  from the Museum of Broadcast Communication’s Encyclopedia of Television
9. Canadian Broadcasting Corp. interview with Marshall McLuhan
10. Harold Jackson’s take on 50s TV:  “It’s not just the TV shows — the short-lived Pan Am and The Playboy Club, as well as Emmy-winner Mad Men and newcomer Magic City (Miami, not Birmingham) — there are other signs that more than a few people want to turn the clock back to a time when white men were unchallenged in their supremacy.”

Media reform

1. Changing Channels: The civil rights case that transformed television — Excellent National Archives article on the WLBT case by Kay Mills
2. American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. “Children and TV Violence,” November 2002.
3. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the Fairness Doctrine and Fox News
4. How Fox News outfoxes Americans by Danny Schechter
5. The Nixon White House invented Fox News, by John Cook.
6. Fade to Black – As a video revolution sweeps the world, US television news caps its lens, Columbia Journalism Review, Sept/Oct 2011, by Dave Marash.  For the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video.  Good news for the future of television news, right? But when YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter show so much video of real life, why do ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox show us so little?
   
7. Apparently what they’d like to show us more of is  programming with adult themes and language, as the networks team up to challenge the famed FCC v Pacifica case.
8. Many of the country’s biggest media companies, which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations, are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending. ProPublica, April 2o, 2012.
9. Election 2012 – Fighting for fair play – Bill Moyers interviews Kathleen Hall Jamison.

International networks

1. Thomas Erdbrink, Al-Jazeera TV network draws criticism, praise for coverage of Arab revolutions,   Washington Post, May 15, 2011.
2. The Sputnik Crisis in the West
3. The New Sputnik (about nuclear power and Fukushima)
4. International Standards – Friendship Among Equals  

Breaking the old television model

1. Apple’s  pushes TV toward Internet delivery  “The struggle to unplug TV viewing from its traditional business model just got more interesting — and messier.” April 2010.
2. Netflix chair Reed Hastings is objecting to proposals for “tiered service” delivery through broadband. The proposals amount to a cap on the amount of content that can be delivered.  May, 2012.
3. TED talks – Chris Anderson, head honcho at TED, has responded to Nick Hanauer’s claimsthat his TED talk was censored. TED, Anderson says, tries “to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people” and that Hanauer “framed the issue in a way that was explicitly partisan.” The upshot, though, is that he’s letting viewers decide for themselves. Watch the video below. May 17, 2012http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bBx2Y5HhplI