Media Coverage of Boston Marathon Bombing

There is a cliff-hanger at the end of the first season of Aaron Sorkin’s television series The West Wing. As President Bartlet is leaving the building in which he has just given a campaign speech, shots ring out – and we fade to black. We learn in the first episode of Season Two that there has indeed been a shooting and the president has been slightly injured; a key staff member has, however, been critically wounded. Naturally, there is a great deal of news hype around the incident (the target was not the president but his African-American valet), and Bartlet’s press secretary C.J. Cregg is kept busy providing updates on the president’s condition, the staff member’s condition, and the manhunt for the suspects.

But in one of her briefings, C.J. gives the sensational-starved press corps a little perspective by pointing out that while “it would be easy to think that President Bartlet, Joshua Lyman, and Stephanie Abbott were the only people who were victims of a gun crime last night, they weren’t. Mark Davis and Sheila Evans of Philadelphia were killed by a gun last night. He was a biology teacher, and she was a nursing student. Tina Bishop and Belinda Larkin were killed with a gun last night; they were 12. There were 36 homicides last night, 480 sexual assaults, 3,411 robberies, 3,685 aggravated assaults, all at gunpoint. “

While C.J. was making a point about gun control, there is clearly another truth contained in the statistics she cites: the story of greater value – in this case the tragic impact of gun violence on average Americans every single day – is most often lost in the noise surrounding an incident that involves a celebrity or an incident that occurs at a public event.

I have long been sceptical of the journalistic values of the new media, particularly television network news. And I have been thinking recently of one real-life example of C.J.’s comments: the Boston Marathon bombings, which occurred on April 15, 2013. Three people died in the bombings; some 264 were injured. In addition, a police officer was allegedly killed by one of the bombers, and a suspect died in a shootout with police. The bombings and the subsequent manhunt resulted in the evacuation of buildings, the closing down of a large area around the site of the attacks, the restriction of airspace, the cancellation or postponement of sport and cultural events, and numerous other emergency precautionary measures.

News coverage of the event was immediate, massive, and sustained, resulting in outpourings of sympathy from around the world; the victims, as well as first responders, were honoured at various events throughout the rest of the year; by November, One Fund, a charity established by Boston mayor Thomas Merino to aid the victims of the bombing, had raised $71 million.

On the same day in April, 75 people died and 356 were injured in a series of bombings and shootings in Iraq. The following day 22 people were killed in suicide bombings in Pakistan; 49 were injured. In 2013 there were 40 homicides in the city of Boston (down from 58 in 2012); in only 16 of these homicides were suspects identified. None of these incidents, apparently, merited the level of coverage afforded the Boston Marathon bombing.

The power of stories such as that of the Boston Marathon to continue to deliver traction for news organizations is demonstrated by the massive coverage of the one-year anniversary of the incident and, two years after the bombing, of the trial and subsequent sentencing – to death – of the surviving perpetrator, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Tsarnaev’s youth, his foreignness, his Islamic faith, and the fact that there is “no death penalty for state crimes” in Massachusetts and that “residents overwhelmingly favored life in prison for Mr. Tsarnaev” (he was tried on federal charges) only served to intensify the drama of the trial.

There is no question that the Boston Marathon bombings constitute a tragedy; any time life is lost or injury sustained in senseless violence a tragedy has occurred. One does wonder, however, why an incident in which only three people died required such extensive news coverage, while other issues of human suffering – homelessness, domestic violence, youth suicide, poverty – with equally tragic results receive little national, regional, or local air time.

None of us is naïve enough not to believe that the television networks are aware, thanks to billions of dollars spent on market research, of what kinds of incidents and events merit the level of coverage given to the Boston Marathon bombings. They know that their breaking news stories will spark conversations in work places, bars and restaurants, schools and colleges, faith communities, and so on, conversations which will cause millions of people to turn on their television sets to learn what all this is about and to keep those sets tuned to this or that network in response to highly effective manipulation of their emotions. So we can pretty confidently say that network executives see increased viewership, and thus increased ratings and revenues, when these incidents occur. They also know exactly how much mileage they can get out of the incident before toning down the coverage and moving on to other news stories. 

It can be argued that news coverage of this incident led to tens of millions of dollars in aid donated to the victims, and such an argument would not be without merit. But we might also argue that few, if any, of the other victims of violence in Boston – or anywhere else in the United States – in 2013 received such beneficence. Were they not equally in distress and deserving of aid?

News organizations depend on our uncritical consumption of such stories as the Boston Marathon bombing and on their ability to manipulate our emotions through carefully selected imagery, sound bites, and the testimony of victims, bystanders, and “experts” of all kinds, in order to sell the products that are advertised during the coverage of such tragic spectacles. In the meantime, as our attention is focused on these tragic events, the larger ongoing tragedies – homelessness, the dominance of gun culture, economic and racial inequality, among many others – go virtually unremarked. The very fact that they are ongoing, the everyday reality of existence, relegates them to the realm of the banal, less worthy of our attention than spectacular events like the Boston Marathon bombing.

Image Credit

“Kendall Coffey on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (2)”, by Kendall Coffey. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

On Track To Color Television

The excited anticipation on the train was palpable. It was June 1951, and RCA is transporting a group of journalists from New York to Washington, DC. Gen. David Sarnoff, Chairman of RCA and founder of NBC, has scheduled a press conference to unveil and demonstrate his new color television system.

But why the excitement? Most of us covering TV have already seen the CBS system which displays brilliant color, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has authorized it for use. The problem, in a word, is “compatibility.”

CBS uses a mechanical spinning disk, field sequence, system which cannot be seen at all on the millions of monochromatic sets in homes and being manufactured.

The modified RCA system, that we were traveling to see, is an all-electronic, dot sequential, system compatible with the existing black and white television standard. One wouldn’t have to rush out and buy color to continue getting a television signal. We all felt it would fly, and the medium could take off with it, if the pictures looked good, and RCA/NBC could get the CBS decision reversed and overcome other competitors. Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, Philco Corp., Hazeltine Corp., Color Television Inc., and General Electric had proposed all-electronic systems of their own.

The man most associated with the CBS color system is Dr. Peter C. Goldmark, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1906. He had a long and fruitful career with the company. Some of his inventions, like the long-playing record, altered entire industries. But his color TV field sequential system was flawed.

Scenes are shot though red, blue and green filters on a rotating disk behind the camera lens. Full-frame images in each of these primary colors are transmitted separately using a lot of scarce broadband space. The viewer at home sees the images through a small section of a large synchronized disk. The size ratio of the disk limits the practical size of the TV screen. It is driven by a separate electric motor. The eye retains the three color images long enough for the brain to blend them into full color — like the still images of a movie projector are seen as a motion picture.

The “persistence of vision” trait is still in play, but RCA sets it up with no mechanically moving parts and needing far less of the broadband spectrum. Their cameras contain three picture tubes, each having a color filter to obtain just one of the primary colors. Images are transmitted, not in full frames. but as a series of discreet color dots which scan the receiver tube with 525 horizontal lines creating 60 frames a second with each line containing all the colors.

David Sarnoff opened the press conference by emphasizing what we were about to see was still a work in progress that would take some time to sufficiently perfect. He was also strongly dismissive of the CBS approach to color television. “Staying with it would be like going back to the horse and buggy when a self-propelled vehicle exists.” Then we got to see that vehicle.

The colors were not as bright as CBS offered. CBS colors were gorgeous, particularly on outdoor nature shots, but I felt they were a little over the top on skin tones and indoor scenes. It was like comparing the colors of Big Sky Montana with the canyons of Manhattan – so to me, the RCA picture looked more “real.”

NBC Peacock Logo © NBC

Nevertheless, the consensus of the TV press corps was that CBS had the superior picture. But RCA’s “Wow!” factor was not in the brilliance of its colors but in the brilliance of its technical triumph.

Sarnoff challenged the FCC’s approval of the CBS system in the courts. Although the appeals to set aside the FCC decision were denied, time was gained to work within the industry-wide National Television System Committee (NTSC) to utilize their combined expertise to come up with a system all could support. If they were to continue to make and sell TV sets, new studio equipment, buy and build additional TV stations, the mechanical color system that was not compatible had to be replaced with an all-electronic one that was. It was the NTSC that set the American standard on black and white TV, so their recommendation on color carried a lot of weight.

On July 21, 1953, the NTSC approved a modified version of RCA’s system and petitioned the FCC for adoption. On December 17th of that year, the FCC officially adopted that standard in place of the CBS system.
RCA’s successful petition for the American color standard stated that the corporation had spent $21 million in research and promised it would expedite equipment production in its manufacturing division and would promptly begin colorcasting over its NBC network.

Finally there was agreement.  Color television was on the right track.

The Father of Modern Television

Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin (1889-1982) Russian-born, American inventor, developed the Iconoscope and a workable cathode-ray tube he called the Kinescope , the two key components of all-electronic television. The Iconoscope camera tube was the eye of television and the Kinescope the prototype of modern television receivers.

Before there were video rebroadcasts, live shows were filmed off the Kinescope tubes and the copied programs were called Kinescopes, an important element of early TV scheduling, networking and archiving.

Zworykin was a man of vision. As a young student in Russia, he first experimented on a very early cathode-ray tube with his professor Boris Rosing. He recognized its huge potential, perhaps more than Rosing and the inventor of the tube, Karl Braun in Germany. He made it his life’s work to perfect it for television.

In Russia he could not get the funding needed for research and development. He moved to the United States in 1919 to work at Westinghouse. Executives there were not overwhelmed with his early television experiments and wanted him to focus on more “practical projects”. When RCA broke away from Westinghouse and GE, he went to work for RCA with the encouragement of its leader David Sarnoff. He was offered a position as director of electronic research where he would have the time and money to realize his dream.

Utah-born, 14-year-old inventor Philo T. Farnsworth sketched out a rudimentary system in 1922 and patented his vision of TV. He developed what he called an Image Dissector tube — elements of which influenced Zworykin’s work on his Iconoscope. RCA, after some legal challenges, eventually signed a patent-licensing agreement with Farnsworth, to achieve commercial implementation of Zworykin’s fully workable, momentous inventions. It was the first time they agreed to pay royalties to another company.

Zworykin’s visionary thinking was evident in a talk he gave at the 1950 Television Institute and Industry Trade Show at the Hotel New Yorker where I met him and was honored to share the speakers roster. He spoke not of engineering problems but of the increasing recognition of television’s possibilities as an instrument of social value. We excerpted his remarks in our publication Televiser.

He said, “The fundamental meaning of television is the extension of human sight…as radio is the extension of human hearing. If we realize this meaning, we will utilize television’s great possibilities more widely for visual education in many fields: medicine, astronomy, in acquainting citizens with the functioning of their government, with international relationships.” He cited examples he foresaw, “In the Armed Forces and industry, when it is desirable to shift the point of observation…for instance, if the process to be observed takes place in an environment that is too dangerous.” One such example making headlines today is the use of drones.

Toward the end of his life, sadly, he said about broadcast television, “I hate what they’ve done to my child…I would never let my own children watch it.” He died on his 94th birthday in Princeton, NJ.

Vladimir Kosma Zworykin – Courtesy of Westinghouse

How Two “ Movie Stars” Helped Pioneering Television Research

Strange as it seems, two toys, replicas of celebrated cartoon characters, Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, had much to do with the quality television image we now enjoy. They helped RCA scientists and engineers gather priceless information.

Choice of the pair was no accident. Their crisply modeled black-and-white bodies were ideal targets for the primitive television cameras. The sharp contrast they provided was easy to observe on experimental kinescopes. As they trained their cameras on the two toys, the technicians were studying the effects of changes and improvements in their instruments and telecasting techniques.

Historical RCA photo from Televiser. Photocopy Bob Harris

Would living actors have done as well? Not according to the RCA techs who say, “With living actors it could never have been absolutely certain that an improvement in the televised image came from an improvement in equipment and techniques—or from some unnoticed change in an actor’s appearance, clothing, makeup.

RCA engineers haven’t forgotten the help the got from Felix and Mickey. “During television’s experimental period, they were the most frequently televised actors on the air. They were our leading ‘TV’ stars.”

They were toys, but this was a cat and mouse game that set the table for an international industry estimated to now be worth more than $324 billion.

Guest Author Bio

Bob Harris
Brooklyn native and television pioneer Bob Harris began his career in the
media arts as a political cartoonist and columnist for the Hollywood Sun in
1940 in Florida at the age of 14. Back in New York he joined the highly prestigious pioneering publication Televiser, later becoming Managing Editor. From 1952 to 1955 he was with the Radio (later Broadcast) Advertising Bureau writing sales presentations, ad copy and handling publicity. He then moved on to the New York World-Telegram & Sun, until 1958, to create advertising promotion presentations. There he got a call from producer Eli Landau inviting him to join WNTA-TV channel 13 to promote The Play of the Week and the other ground breaking program series they were launching. In 1960, Harris, his wife Sheila and their two children moved to California where Bob joined the CBS O&O station in San Francisco followed by KLAC in Los Angeles as promotion director of the stations. In 1970 Harris opened the Bob Harris Agency where, in addition to his broadcast clients, he represented three national television publications – Back Stage, Shoot, and Emmy Magazine and the London-based international trade publication, TV World. After closing the agency in 1993, Harris went freelance as an entertainment writer as well as becoming an art docent for the Getty Center and gallery guide for the Los Angeles Museum of Art.

Contact Bob Harris at:  bharris7@pacbell.net

Television is my game.

And a fascinating one it has been for the past 67 years. I entered the field in 1948, the same year that Milton Berle, comedian, and Ed Sullivan, Broadway columnist, did. Their shows, more than anything else, spurred the sale of TV sets to a mass audience which in turn launched television as a major advertising medium. This attracted performers, writers, and production talents from the stage, movies, radio and sports, who at first saw television as a threat. In the beginning advertisers would sponsor the entire show until rates climbed so high that they could not afford to do so. The pattern then changed to buying commercial spots on various programs to reach their targeted demographics.

Early CBS Color Camera – Image © CBS – Reproduction Courtesy of Bob Harris

So Berle’s show was the Texaco Star Theater on NBC Tuesday nights. The format was slapstick comedy mixed with extravagant musical production numbers. Berle not only became “Mr. Television” but Mr. Tuesday nights. The paucity of customers at restaurants, the movies and other events on that night made his dominance evident. His popularity lead to other nicknames too. Affectionately, he was known as “Uncle Miltie” and since he boasted about stealing jokes, “The Thief of Badgags”.

Sullivan’s The Toast of the Town variety show (Later called The Ed Sullivan Show) on CBS became a Sunday night habit in millions of households. He was stiff and awkward in his role as MC but, perhaps because of his influence as a columnist for the Daily News, New York’s largest circulation newspaper, he brought top talent to the show when interest in them was high. He was the first to present the Beatles in this country and gave Elvis Presley his first network exposure. This, combined with a mix of top vaudeville acts made for, as he promised, “A Really Big Shew”. The way he slurred the word became a big joke but his show was a big hit, the longest running variety show on television.

As an editor of the highly regarded trade magazine Televiser, published by Irwin A. Shane, I had a golden opportunity to meet and interview most of TV’s key players. The pioneers in all aspects of the medium read the publication and many famous and historic industry leaders wrote featured articles. The behind the scenes stories of these pioneering people and events, as well as exclusive drawings and photos, you will see no where else, are the material of this “Notebook” which I hope to add to periodically.

March 1950 Televiser with William Adams and Grace Kelly in “Ann Rutledge” written by Norman Corwin – Image © NBC-TV – Reproduction Courtesy of Bob Harris

Here then, just as it appeared in the June 1950 issue of Televiser, is my “Off Camera” column containing notes I took while observing Milton Berle rehearsing and directing his Star Theater show that would air that night live.

Off Camera Column

MILTON BERLE is quite a man. You cannot appreciate how truly he is “Mister Television”, unless you can penetrate his TV “Maginot Line” and catch a rehearsal of the Texaco Star Theatre.

COLORFULLY DRESSED in maroon slacks, a blue jersey, and brown suede jacket, Berle inevitably has a cigar in his mouth and whistle strung around his neck. The whistle quickly summons attention when his verbal directions cannot be heard.

BERLE CREATES and molds the show from beginning to end. He books the talent, works closely with his writers, and is his own director. (Arthur Knorr is the producer, Eddie Kahn is the T.D.)

SITTING IN THE FIRST ROW of the studio before a TV set, Berle is able to speak through a microphone to both the performers on the stage and to the men in the control room. “Dissolve to a medium shot on camera three and pan down”; “Start from the fourth bar and play it legato”; “Kill the spot and bring up the stage lights”; “Paint those dummy cameras so that they look real”.

ONE MOMENT BERLE is on the podium leading the band much to the astonishment of conductor Allen Roth, the next he is on stage demonstrating to dancer Lou Wills, Jr. how to segue into his specialty from a dancing stage entrance.

WHENEVER POSIBLE Berle has a stand-in go through his own routines while he views proceedings from the director’s chair. When actually on stage, he is able to call shots by watching another receiving set located behind the footlights. He directs with a firm hand and is easily upset by interruptions or the failure of anyone to follow directions. However, he frequently breaks the tense atmosphere prevailing in the studio with an ad lib gag.

ZANIES DEAN MARTIN and Jerry Lewis really give Uncle Miltie a hard time when guesting on his show by keeping in comic character at all times. Lewis, when not making faces at himself in the stage monitor, might poke his head through the stage curtains and call out “Hey, porter, what town is this?” He’ll suddenly turn to the studio assembly and say in a straight face “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.”

LEWIS’ FAVORITE PRANK is aping Berle’s serious manner of giving directions. He’ll latch on to the boom mike and scream “Hey, Arthur, bring in the zoomar and dolly out the cathode ray tube”. In a desperate attempt to get order, Berle said “If you don’t cooperate Jerry, after the show you’ll be saying the cameras missed a lot of your stuff.” “Oh you said that last time, Berle” replied Lewis, “and we went over PRETTY big.”

DEAN MARTIN, who is no slouch at ad libbing either, interrupted Lewis’ antics. “Come on, Jerry. Leave Mr. Berle alone,” Martin said, “after all, we can do anything but this is his only means of livelihood”.

Guest Author Bio

Bob Harris © Sheila Harris

Bob Harris
Brooklyn native and television pioneer Bob Harris began his career in the media arts as a political cartoonist and columnist for the Hollywood Sun in Hollywood, Florida, in 1941 at the age of 14. He joined and soon became the managing editor of Televiser Magazine in 1948. From 1950-1955, he joined the Radio Advertising Bureau as a publicity and promotion writer. In 1955 Harris became the advertising sales presentation writer for the New York World-Telegram and Sun until 1958 when he moved over to WNTA Channel 13 as advertising-promotions director. In 1960 Harris, his wife Sheila and their two children moved to California where Bob joined KCBS Radio in San Francisco followed by KLAC in Los Angeles as their promotions director. In 1970 Harris opened the Bob Harris Agency where in addition to his ad clients he represented three national television publications – Back Stage, Shoot and Emmy Magazine, and the London-based international television trade publication, TV World. After closing the agency in 1993, Harris went freelance as an entertainment writer as well as becoming an art docent for the Getty Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Contact Bob Harris at: bharris7@pacbell.net

 Part 2 – On Track to Color Television