The Decade That Shaped Television News: CBS in the 1950s

by Sig Mickelson

Overview

Television news made meteoric progress in the 1950s. It rose from being a plaything for the rich to a major factor in informing the American public, and an aggressive rival to newspapers, radio, and news magazines. This volume is an insider's account of the arduous and frequently critical steps undertaken by inexperienced staffs in the development of television news, documentaries, and sports broadcasts. The author, the first president of CBS News, provides a treasure trove of facts and anecdotes about plotting in the corridors, the ascendancy of stars, and the retirement into oblivion of the less favored.

This volume is an important contribution to the history of television jourbanalism and will appeal both to jourbanalism and broadcasting scholars and to those interested in the meteoric rise of television.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275955670
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/27/1998
Series:	Collection
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)
Lexile:	1280L (what's this?)

About the Author

SIG MICKELSON is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Distinguished Professor of Jourbanalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. He has served as Vice President of CBS, Inc., and was the first president of CBS News. He is the author of America's Other Voice (Praeger, 1983) and From Whistle Stop to Sound Bite (Praeger, 1989), and the editor of The First Amendment—The Challenge of New Technology (Praeger, 1989).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Decade That Shaped Television News
The Search for a Road Map
The First Awkward Steps
A New Star on the Horizon
Driving Television's Golden Spike
A New Species of Documentary: The Birth of "See It Now"
Breaking New Ground
Blacklisting and the Exploitation of Fear
Not So Strange Bedfellows: Politics and Television
Television News Comes of Age
The Great Airplane Race
The Corporation Declares a Cease-Fire
Aftermath of the Cease-Fire
Spare the Rod but Don't Spoil the Picture
Combat in the Corporate Stratosphere
The Changing of the Guard
Filling the "See It Now" Void: The Birth of "CBS Reports"
The Happy Couple: Pigskin and Image Orthicon Tube
Carrying the Olympic Torch to Television
In Pursuit of the Dollar
The End of the Decade
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

The first president of CBS News documents the rise of television news from a curious novelty to a power rival of newspapers, radio, and news magazines despite inadequate funding and the absence of trained personnel. He includes sports coverage and documentaries, many anecdotes, and a few photographs. Distributed in the US by Greenwood. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

A gee-whiz celebration of the 1950s communications revolution that in the end manages to inspire awe for the time when public affairs mattered and people cared. Mickelson (From Whistle Stop to Sound Bite, 1989, etc.), the first president of CBS News, at first forces an unnecessary technical study of the progress and setbacks of "coaxial cables and microwave relays"þingredients in the painful birth of the medium, and painful reading. In the personal account that follows, though, the author places the "birth of TV" at the 1948 political conventions and continues on through the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, by which time television was as formidable a political force as either candidate. The long, arduous decade in between brought red-baiting, threats of government interference, and the 1959 "quiz scandals" all seemingly quaint in the era of Jerry Springer and deregulation. But Mickelson makes it all fresh, spinning it into a seamless narrative driven by a cast that even Network couldn't replicate, including the brash and ingenious neophyte Don Hewitt, who went on to create 60 Minutes. Cavalier star personality Edward R. Murrow, whose driving ambition was to redress wrongs and excoriate the rest of television programming for its "decadence, escapism, and insulation," was alienated from the network for refusing to temper his progressive standpoint. (He and producer Fred Friendly presented the case that brought Senator Joseph McCarthy down.) Mickelson, who unjustifiably downplays his own role in the formation of broadcast news, offers up priceless anecdotes of a history he and his colleagues helped to shape, faltering only when he tries to articulate the magic of it all. As a bonus, hethrows in the story of the fantastic, symbiotic relationship that turned Sunday afternoons into must-see-TV and the lackluster game of football into the close second as national pastime. No paean to CBS, this brings some sense to the creation of a monster and restores some noble prestige to a medium that has all but lost it.

Kirkus Reviews