Evening News, Television

Roots

Newscasts are not definitive reports, only rough summaries of daily developments likely to affect or at least interest large numbers of people. CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and other leading journalists have characterized these programs as providing a “headline service” abstracting world and national developments that viewers can explore more deeply elsewhere, especially in newspapers (and more recently on cable channels and the Internet). The newscasts present news constructed around topics and in styles meant to reflect the problems and interests of “ordinary people.” Topics come to the attention of news organizations in public ways—in rallies, releases of surveys, crime waves, and shopping stampedes—or less conspicuously through editors' intuitions and the networks' audience research. However producers defined their raw materials, the American “dinnertime” television programs emerging in the years following World War II came to wield unique power to attract national audiences to news and to help determine the agenda for public consideration of important issues.

The slow birth of network evening newscasts provided few indicators of a future of national influence. By the early 1940s, CBS and NBC were managing to televise special news events to very limited audiences. The pioneering NBC program launched in 1944 and aptly named The War as It Happens could be seen (by those few owning receivers) only in New York City and in two other communities electronically linked by NBC: Schenectady, New York, and Philadelphia. This three-city “network” reached only hundreds of television sets. A mass audience for TV news would take years to build, depending on development of hundreds of affiliated stations that could deliver programs around the country.

Radio had helped to demonstrate that a truly national audience for television was a future (if distant) certainty. Even before Japan's December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor drew the United States into a widened war, the voices of CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow, his corps of “Murrow boys,” and other unseen radio journalists brought home to Americans the drama, gravity, and damage of the growing conflict. Film of the great drama also played in newsreels on theater screens across the country, bringing even rural Americans glimpses of international conflict accompanied by ominous narration, dramatic music and aerial views of bombs dropping. Newsreels intensified emotions across the home front as only vivid moving pictures could.

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