Some people criticize the coverage calling it primitive, amateurish and limited. Let’s look at it in the context of 1963. The evening network news casts were all 15 minutes long until CBS extended their evening news to 30 minutes on September 2, 1963. The first extended newscast featured a lengthy interview with President John F. Kennedy. This was the second attempt at a longer evening news show. ABC scheduled a mix of 30 and 60 minute daily news casts in 1952-53 under the title All Star News. The All Star News program featured a woman among the four anchors - Bryson Rash, Pauline Frederick, Gordon Fraser and Leo Cherne. The ground breaking news show was not a rating success - it came on before many stations in the west could hook into the coaxial cable to be networked. Unfortunately there are no clips available at this time but it’s concept would return years later in the form of Nightline, the PBS Newshour and long form news shows in major cities in the 1960s-70s. News at the time was a public service - it was content that helped a station keep it’s license. It usually didn’t turn a profit but it was in the public interest. The system that networks and groups of TV stations used was made up of AT&T coaxial cables and various shorter range microwave relay towers. There were a limited number of TV quality circuits available to feed signals to the network centers in New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago. It wasn’t junk that the networks were using to produce and transmit live television - it was state of the art in the early 1960s. But part of the state of the art involved what we might term somewhat primitive vacuum tubes, image orthicon tubes, a limited phone system and an electronic broadcast system in what was still a mostly mechanical world. Electronic graphics wouldn’t be available until late 1967 in anticipation of the 1968 Olympic coverage and the elections. So on that day national TV news coverage had only been around for ten years. When TV news covered something live it required preparation - sometimes months of it to have everything just right.. Things had to be just right or the TV picture would arrive as a jumbled mass of static and rolling vertical lines. Remote broadcasting was still a major undertaking for TV stations and networks in the early 1960s. Much planning went into covering the popular sports of the era - baseball, football, boxing and to a more limited amount basketball. It would take months to prepare and set up CBS’ coverage of the Masters for example. In fact the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in January, 1961 took months of planning and coordination by the three networks to pull it off. The networks pooled their resources, with each network providing camera coverage of each part of the event from procession to the capital, the speeches, the swearing in, the parade and other activities throughout Washington D.C. Each network had it’s own reporters and anchors but it might be an ABC camera showing the president to be walking through the capital. A CBS camera showing the swearing in. A NBC camera showing the inaugural speech. The coverage all blended together. Now the three networks were responding to an event a long ways from their network centers. In a country that had limited communication lines between Dallas and New York. Staff’s went to work to get studios ready, microwave links established, and clearing phone lines. Reporters in Dallas ran around looking for any phone available - and there weren’t many at Parkland Hospital.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 20:08:21 +0000
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