Roger Simon: The birth of political television
[Roger Simon is the Chief Political Columnist of Politico.com.]
In March 1948, Don Hewitt was 26 years old and working at Acme News Pictures in New York handling photographs when a friend called from CBS telling him there was a job for him there.
In 1948, CBS meant radio, and Hewitt was confused. "What would a radio network want with a guy with picture experience?" Hewitt asked.
"It's television," his friend said.
"What-a-vision?" Hewitt asked.
He was unfamiliar with the word. But he could be forgiven. Though television had been invented prior to World War II, there were only about 350,000 TVs — then called "receiving sets" — in existence in America in 1948, only 18 cities that had TV stations and very little original programming.
But 1948 looked like a good year to change that, because 1948 was a presidential election year, and TV figured it might be able to make politics look interesting. Somehow.
The political conventions were the place to start. The Republicans and Democrats were both going to hold their conventions in Philadelphia and for the first time in history, the TV networks would broadcast the conventions live from "gavel bang to gavel bang," as Newsweek termed it.
Actually, only nine cities on the East Coast from New York City to Richmond, Va., would get the picture live (AT&T had just finished laying a coaxial cable linking them), but the rest of the TV stations in America would be shipped kinescopes — movies of TV pictures — by air mail and could broadcast them the next day.
Giant aerials were erected atop the 17-year-old Municipal Auditorium in Philadelphia, which had been spruced up at a cost of $650,000 for a new sound system, roof and interior paint job of blue and gold. It was money well spent because now everything would look good and sound good for TV. Air conditioning was rejected as too expensive.
The stage was set, and everyone was so giddy about the new venture that few bothered to plan for it. The networks didn't really know what it would cover. Or how. Or why.
"You mean people are going to sit at home and watch little pictures in a box?" Hewitt asked when his friend at CBS offered him a job on the phone. "I don't believe it."
"Go look at it," his friend said.
Hewitt did, fell in love with the medium and, as executive producer of "60 Minutes," presided over one of the most successful shows in the history of television.
But in 1948, as a newly minted "associate director" — TV was making up titles as it went along — he was put up along with the rest of the CBS team in a fraternity house at the University of Pennsylvania. (The city had only 6,000 hotel rooms, whose average rates had been doubled to an outrageous $12 per night.)
"I didn't know very much about TV in Philadelphia, but neither did anybody else," Hewitt told me years ago when I interviewed him for a magazine piece on the 1948 conventions. "There was not a hotbed of knowledge about television."
But CBS had a big radio star — Edward R. Murrow — and he agreed to do television. It worked out.
"We were plowing new ground," Hewitt said. "And the conventions were an event for one reason only: There were primaries, but they didn't determine the nominee. The conventions did. The minute primaries became the primary way of naming the candidate, conventions lost their appeal."
But people seemed to enjoy watching television, and politicians were quick to catch on to the potential of the new medium. Harry Truman, the incumbent president, had a television in the Oval Office — another first — and he watched it...
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In March 1948, Don Hewitt was 26 years old and working at Acme News Pictures in New York handling photographs when a friend called from CBS telling him there was a job for him there.
In 1948, CBS meant radio, and Hewitt was confused. "What would a radio network want with a guy with picture experience?" Hewitt asked.
"It's television," his friend said.
"What-a-vision?" Hewitt asked.
He was unfamiliar with the word. But he could be forgiven. Though television had been invented prior to World War II, there were only about 350,000 TVs — then called "receiving sets" — in existence in America in 1948, only 18 cities that had TV stations and very little original programming.
But 1948 looked like a good year to change that, because 1948 was a presidential election year, and TV figured it might be able to make politics look interesting. Somehow.
The political conventions were the place to start. The Republicans and Democrats were both going to hold their conventions in Philadelphia and for the first time in history, the TV networks would broadcast the conventions live from "gavel bang to gavel bang," as Newsweek termed it.
Actually, only nine cities on the East Coast from New York City to Richmond, Va., would get the picture live (AT&T had just finished laying a coaxial cable linking them), but the rest of the TV stations in America would be shipped kinescopes — movies of TV pictures — by air mail and could broadcast them the next day.
Giant aerials were erected atop the 17-year-old Municipal Auditorium in Philadelphia, which had been spruced up at a cost of $650,000 for a new sound system, roof and interior paint job of blue and gold. It was money well spent because now everything would look good and sound good for TV. Air conditioning was rejected as too expensive.
The stage was set, and everyone was so giddy about the new venture that few bothered to plan for it. The networks didn't really know what it would cover. Or how. Or why.
"You mean people are going to sit at home and watch little pictures in a box?" Hewitt asked when his friend at CBS offered him a job on the phone. "I don't believe it."
"Go look at it," his friend said.
Hewitt did, fell in love with the medium and, as executive producer of "60 Minutes," presided over one of the most successful shows in the history of television.
But in 1948, as a newly minted "associate director" — TV was making up titles as it went along — he was put up along with the rest of the CBS team in a fraternity house at the University of Pennsylvania. (The city had only 6,000 hotel rooms, whose average rates had been doubled to an outrageous $12 per night.)
"I didn't know very much about TV in Philadelphia, but neither did anybody else," Hewitt told me years ago when I interviewed him for a magazine piece on the 1948 conventions. "There was not a hotbed of knowledge about television."
But CBS had a big radio star — Edward R. Murrow — and he agreed to do television. It worked out.
"We were plowing new ground," Hewitt said. "And the conventions were an event for one reason only: There were primaries, but they didn't determine the nominee. The conventions did. The minute primaries became the primary way of naming the candidate, conventions lost their appeal."
But people seemed to enjoy watching television, and politicians were quick to catch on to the potential of the new medium. Harry Truman, the incumbent president, had a television in the Oval Office — another first — and he watched it...