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That’s the Way It Used to be

2017; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.2017.0023

1080-6628

T. Doherty,

Media Studies and Communication

That’s the Way It Used to be Thomas Doherty (bio) Charles L. Ponce de Leon. That’s the Way It Is: A History of Television News in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xx + 310 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00. Projected in washed-out kinescopes and desaturated videotape, the pioneers of broadcast journalism come down to us as immortals who walked the earth, or rather prowled the airwaves, beamed in from a galaxy far, far away. What the founding anchors lacked in mobile camerawork and satellite uplinks, they made up for in intelligence, experience, and—always that word—gravitas. Speak their names and a hush falls over the crowd at the Columbia Journalism Review: Murrow, the patron saint of the priesthood; Cronkite, the most trusted man in America; Brinkley, the acerbic gadfly. In legend, memoir, and textbook, the trajectory from the sober, articulate talking heads of Three Network Hegemony to the monosyllabic exploding heads of the 24/7 cable matrix traces a sad devolution—from broadcast news as dignified ritual to knuckle-dragging clown show. Charles L. Ponce de Leon is having none of it—or so he says. The misty water-colored memories of the way they were at the creation of television news is a nice story to tell the children, but it is not really in line with the audiovisual archives or corporate files. A professor of history and American studies at California State University Long Beach, Ponce de Leon seeks to set the record straight and “situate television news in its appropriate historical context and see its evolution without the mythic blinders that have led many to regard the era of Cronkite as a kind of golden age” (p. xii). Less a story of rise, decline, and fall than eternal flow, the transmission of television news was never pure, always compromised—by commerce, by the cool medium, and by viewers who preferred visceral images and dramatic hooks to complex storylines and downer messages, especially if they took place on foreign shores. Billing the work as a “synthetic history” (p. xvi), Ponce de Leon undertakes a step-by-step survey of the corporate and cultural history of television news, from the Camel News Caravan to The O’Reilly Factor. The march through the familiar byways is chronological and straightforward: from the CBS-NBC-ABC troika, to the birth and growth of PBS, to the round-the-clock bulletins and [End Page 167] blather on CNN, MSNBC, and FNC, and thence to the challenges—or are they mortal wounds?—afflicted by the digital revolution. Throughout, the author is especially attentive to the industrial and economic factors that shape the news and, unlike many scholars, gives due attention to the influence of local news shows, whose format moved up the food chain to take over the presentational style of the networks. Perhaps little in Ponce de Leon’s history will be new to scholars of the medium, but his crisp summaries and sharp sketches of landmark events, personalities, and programs will serve as a valuable crib sheet and a pedagogically useful sourcebook. The work seems destined to have a long shelf life as a go-to news-on-screen text for undergraduate courses. It also provides a welcome corrective to the CBS-centricity of so much of the extant scholarship, such as David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be (1979) and Ed Bliss’ Now the News (1991). Ponce de Leon packs his account with mini-biographies of battalions of anchors, producers, and beat reporters; capsule descriptions of dozens of programs, epochal and ephemeral; and reviews of the slices of U.S. history—assassinations, riots, moon walks, and wars—that are interwoven indelibly with the medium that recorded them. The précis are succinct, no-nonsense, and—at least until the final chapter—free of obvious ideological slant. He writes with terse insight: “Compared to the urbane Jennings and NBC’s Tom Brokaw, a laconic mild-mannered Midwesterner, Dan Rather was a tense, tightly wound, at times passionate broadcaster” (p. 213). He also passes along judgments with which most readers will nod in agreement: Nightline was “a milestone in TV journalism, ranking with See It Now...