The arc of the 20th century is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is how it was shaped by dramatic and traumatic events, including the Great Depression and two world wars. However, the arc of its communication mechanisms is equally striking, though less discussed outside computing and business circles. It began with Marconi and “wireless,” transitioned through commercial radio and broadcast television, and ended with the Internet and streaming media.
For millennials and those younger, it may now seem almost inconceivable, but there was a time when almost everyone in the United States heard the news from the same three television channels, watched the same television shows, and listened to the same music on a popular local radio station. Most cities had both morning and evening daily newspapers, filled with both the minutia of daily life – crimes, weddings, and funerals – with a smattering of national and international news, and local investigative journalism by the fourth estate, shining a bit of light into the darkness. These were shared cultural experiences, woven throughout the fabric of American society.
All that has changed, some for the better, and arguably, some for the worse.
The Golden Age of Broadcast Television
In the first half of the 20th century, radio was the primary mechanism for disseminating entertainment and news. Beginning in the 1950s, analog (NTSC) broadcast television on the VHF and UHF bands – the big three (CBS, NBC, and ABC) -- began dominating the airwaves, with PBS as a public television latecomer. Led by CBS News and Walter Cronkite, the nightly news broadcasts from the big three defined the national conversation on U.S. and global events, albeit mostly from a white, middle American perspective.
Unlike today’s extended social commentaries on 24x7 cable news channels, the nightly news was largely delivered in a staccato “just the facts, ma’am” format. As Cronkite put it at the end of each broadcast, “And that's the way it is.” Although the broadcast standards supported color, the high cost of color television meant broadcasts were mostly in black-and-white until the 1960s.
Nor were there live standups from international locations or from across the studio, rather international reports were often recorded on film, then shipped to news bureaus for subsequent development and editing; remote satellite broadcasts were yet to come. Breaking news interrupted normal network programming, as this iconic photograph of Walter Cronkite informing the nation of President Kennedy’s assassination shows.
At thirty minutes, including commercials, the network news reports also offered little time for pontification and social commentary. That made Cronkite’s February 27, 1968 special report on the Vietnam War all the more telling, when after returning from Vietnam following the Tet Offensive, he concluded,
But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
Such was the trust in Uncle Walter that unsubstantiated stories have long said President Johnson then remarked, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
However, I did not see that, because for most of my grade school years, our aging black-and-white console TV worked only sporadically. When it did, to change channels, my father had to climb on the roof and manually rotate the antenna, while my mother leaned out the window to give him updates on the TV signal quality. Needless to say, we picked a channel and stuck with it, in our case, the Springfield, Missouri NBC affiliate (KYTV), which aired the Huntley-Brinkley Report.
Consequently, I distinctly remember Huntley and Brinkley making their own antiwar statement in 1969 by playing Kenny Rogers’ version of Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town. While Rogers sang haunting words about a “crazy Asian war,” a camera panned through various footage, highlighting the sacrifices of U.S. draftees and their families. Huntley and Brinkley then ended the news with their distinctive signoff, “Good night, Chet. Good night, David. And good night, for NBC News.” (Huntley broadcast from New York and Brinkley from Washington, D.C.)
When I was in the fifth grade, my parents bought a new Sears Silvertone black-and-white TV and splurged for a new cable TV connection, and for the first time, we received all four channels. In later years, this gave me access to Star Trek reruns (See Star Trek@50: Inspiring Discovery and Innovation) and The Dick Cavett Show, which featured an interesting and eclectic set of guests unknown to a small town boy. (See Eudora, You Got the Love?)
Until the 1980s, the four channel cultural gestalt of broadcast television extended far beyond news. In those days, people remembered where they were and those around them when they learned about the birth of Little Ricky, Who Shot J.R., and the ending of M*A*S*H. (For the latter, I was sitting on a hotel room bed in Madison, Wisconsin.) The morning-after water cooler bonding from discussing I Love Lucy, Bonanza, M*A*S*H. Dallas, and hundreds of other hit television shows has now disappeared.
Top 40 Radio
Top 40 AM radio had a similar cultural reach, where being in heavy rotation was a clear sign that a song was a national hit, known to most teenagers and adults. Then each Saturday, Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, counted down “the biggest hits in the U.S.A.” and American Bandstand, with the ageless Dick Clark, highlighted a popular singer or band. I heard and saw little of that, as I had neither a radio nor a television in my bedroom. Nor did I buy and play 45 RPM singles or 33 and 1/3 RPM albums. All of these were far beyond my financial reach.
My parents owned a small kitchen radio, which we only turned on as we prepared for work and school. Lacking an external antenna, we received only clear channel AM stations and a few nearby FM stations. Like the television, it was an aging vacuum tube radio, which took a while to warm up after it was turned on. When it failed, we would take the failing tube, which no longer lit up, to the local drugstore, use the tube tester, and buy a compatible replacement tube.
Tuned to the local AM station (KALM), we received news read from the Associated Press wires and a healthy dose of country music. I became well acquainted with Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, and a variety of other country singers, but I didn’t like the affected twang and the frequent stories of pickup trucks and lost love, all in search of what David Allan Coe jokingly sang about as the perfect country song:
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got run over by a damned old train
The exception was Johnny Cash; I loved Cash from the very first time I heard him. As a poet and a fellow Arkansas boy, he spoke to deeper things – social inequities, the war, and personal loss. There are few things more melancholy than his rendition of Sunday Morning Coming Down or more haunting than his late life cover of Hurt, a song by Nine Inch Nails. (Never underestimate the power of a great singer to make another’s song their own. Heart’s Kennedy Center Honors cover of Stairway to Heaven brought Led Zeppelin to tears.)
Surprisingly, we did have the radio on one afternoon on New Year’s Eve, when the local DJ cum newscaster said, with some mocking mirth, that he was going to play the most popular song in the country for that year, the implication being that this music was drug-crazed rock and roll. With that sardonic introduction, Don Mclean’s American Pie began to play, and I was immediately transfixed with wonder. Here was another poet, as evocative as Cash, speaking to a different generation about sadness and loss.
Given our household’s one radio and shared TV, other than a few TV variety shows like The Hollywood Palace, my access to rock and roll was largely limited to our car, but only after I learned to drive in 1973 and could pick up a Memphis rock station. As a result, I missed the British Invasion and almost all of the music of the 1960s and early 1970s. I do remember one of the older girls who lived nearby being devastated when the Beatles broke up, though I didn’t understand why it was such a big deal.
Digital Transformation
The uniformity of radio and television content in the post-World War II era created common cultural referents, but they largely targeted white, middle class families. If you were black, Hispanic, Asian, immigrant, poor, rural, or in any other way not part of the white middle class, you were rarely heard or seen, except in caricature or stereotype. (For the record, the Clampetts on The Beverly Hillbillies were unlike anyone I knew in my small Ozarks town.)
Slowly and haltingly, things began to change for the better, as radio and television began to reflect the population’s social and economic diversity and its wide range of interests more accurately. Antiwar demonstrations and civil rights protests forced broadcast news to begin presenting important social issues in a more nuanced way, highlighting previously marginalized voices, and television shows began doing the same (e.g., see All in the Family).
Concurrently, legal and financial battles over cable television must carry rules, the rise of cable superstations such as WGN and WTBS, the emergence of FOX as a fourth television network, new pay-per-view services, movie networks such as HBO, and expanded cable capacity all diluted and diffused the market dominance of the big three commercial broadcast networks. Suddenly, everyone could get their MTV.
In the midst of this, the transition to high definition, digital television began, which changed wireless spectrum needs. Notably, as analog television stations vacated parts of the VHF and UHF bands, portions of this spectrum were repurposed. While at Microsoft, I served as a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Technical Advisory Committee and worked with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on the use of the TV white spaces for unlicensed “super Wi-Fi” to address rural and underserved communities and regions in the U.S. and broadband access across the world. (See White Spaces: Celebrating the Cambridge Trial.) Remember, analog broadcast television originally chose the VHF and UHF bands due to their long distance propagation characteristics, making them idea for communication across long distances.
Today, only live sporting events can deliver the viewership, advertising revenues, and shared experiences once common on broadcast television. It’s why the bidding for U.S. television rights to the Olympics, the NFL and Super Bowl, and March Madness (NCAA men’s basketball) is now so intense.
Just as these brave new worlds of cable and digital television were reshaping mass media, the Internet and the World Wide Web appeared, something I was privileged to witness firsthand at the University of Illinois when the Mosaic web browser appeared. As broadband availability and speeds increased, new access modes appeared, and creative market destruction soon followed. (As the COVID-19 pandemic has again exposed, broadband inequity in the United States – availability, cost, and bandwidth – remains a serious problem. See Broadband: Oxygen for a Digital World.)
Although there were effective Internet search engines before Google search appeared (e.g., AltaVista), Google found a successful revenue model based on targeted advertising. After all, if you are searching for left-handed scissors, you might want to buy a pair. Combining this information with search history and web cookies could delivered a prospective customer hit rate rarely matched by the blanket advertising from newspapers, radio, and television. This devastated the traditional revenue models of daily newspapers, forcing some to merge with rivals and many others to close. Sadly, this has meant many towns and cities now lack local, independent investigative journalism.
Similarly, the convenience of Netflix movie streaming, with thousands of movies just a click away, destroyed the VHS and DVD rental market. Although Netflix initially distributed rental DVDs by mail, it was created in anticipation of higher broadband speeds that would enable streaming. Co-founder Reed Hastings once said this was why they didn’t name the company DVDflix. Coupled with inexpensive, large screen high-definition televisions, the locus of money and power soon shifted from the traditional movie studies, though few would have then imagined that Amazon would someday buy MGM to feed its Amazon Prime Video streaming service.
Paradoxically, Internet broadband gave birth to narrowcasting – websites, channels, and streaming media targeting very specific demographics. Enamored with reruns of The Gong Show (“We’ll be right back with more – stuff!”), The Lawrence Welk Show (my parents loved it) or The Midnight Special? Interested in collimating your Ritchey–Chrétien telescope, folding a paper airplane, or collecting vintage salt and pepper shakers? Fear not, YouTube is there for you. Love reggae/zydeco fusion or KISS tribute bands? There’s a streaming music service for just your interests. Meanwhile, music CD sales (and even downloads) continue to plummet, following the same path to extinction as DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
The Triumph of Narrowcasting
In the early 21st century, digital narrowcasting has clearly triumphed – whatever the interest, there’s now an app or a targeted steam for it. Every other form of media distribution, from print news organizations through movie studios to broadcast television networks, is now scrambling to adapt, with varying success. Not surprisingly, any such change brings both new opportunities and associated challenges.
On the one hand, digital narrowcasting has been hugely democratizing, freeing individuals and organizations to communicate directly with their target demographic. This blog is an example, allowing me to ruminate on any topic of my choosing, then share my ideas using social media, something only possible because instant, global communication is now effectively free. Similarly, websites, streaming media, and other tools mean individuals and shared interest groups can quickly find likeminded partners and collaborators, however narrow or arcane their interests.
Historically, the small number of broadcast platforms – newspapers, radio, and television – each had a large audience. Today, a plethora of platforms compete for a much smaller slice of the global audience, some by choice and others by necessity. Although everyone can be a social media content creator, with a potentially global audience, in practice, only a few achieve any significant influence or visibility. As the late Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon astutely noted, “… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
The insatiable maw of digital channels must be filled, even if with endless and mind-numbing repetition. Just how many home renovation knockoffs of PBS’s This Old House can HGTV make? How many reruns of the Law and Order franchise can competing cable channels show simultaneously? Can the hosts of the cable news channels talk any more while saying even less, filling the minutes with personal opinions and creating venues that attract only the likeminded?
Digital Echo Chambers
As I look to Claude Shannon, the geek’s patron saint of information theory, I fear not all is well in the 21st century world of digital narrowcasting; the signal-to-noise ratio of digital discourse is now near de minimis, with a cacophony of discordant voices vying for finite mindshare. Is it possible for us to imagine and create a digital world where we more clearly distinguish information (facts) from opinion, persuasion, and social consensus? Each has a role, when clearly demarcated and delineated, but they are not the same.
Facts are independently testable and verifiable, with truth independent of one’s own opinions or beliefs. It is raining at this place and this time is a testable statement, provably true or false. An opinion is not a fact. “I think it is raining” is an opinion; it may or may not be accurate. Fact-based persuasion is convincing someone else it is raining using clear, verifiable evidence that it is, in fact, raining; demagoguery is not. Social consensus is a widely held perspective, best supported by history and evidence. It is bad if it rains on an outdoor baseball game is social consensus. (See Just the Facts, Ma’am: Reasoning is Not Dead, Jim.)
With that backdrop, the goal of any reputable information source should not be to tell you how to think; it should be to provide you with facts that allow you to develop your own hypotheses, test them against evidence, then revise them accordingly. Unbiased information – the facts – is the prelude to evidence-based reasoning and informed discourse. Such informed national discourse requires shared intellectual context, something in danger of being lost in a narrowcasting world.
All too often, the explosion of tailored communications and personal preferences can trap any one of us in a self-reinforcing echo chamber that separates and potentially demonizes those unlike us, confusing facts with opinions and beliefs. Put another way, if you have been sitting in your underwear for multiple days, binging on potato chips and beer, watching endless reruns of The Big Bang Theory, surfing the dark web, and reading extremist social media (either from the far right or the far left), it’s time to get dressed, open the curtains, seek information, and expose yourself to other perspectives, especially those that differ from your own. Fact-based understanding and multilateral communication are a messy, participatory process – one must listen, talk, and think – but from it, mutual understanding and shared perspectives, both grounded in facts, can emerge.
In higher education today, there is great focus on imparting knowledge and inculcating skills, and they are important, because employers prize them. However, knowledge transmission pales in importance relative to teaching critical thinking – the ability to analyze evidence, test ideas, adjust one’s perspective, and form rational, thoughtful and nuanced insights. Critical thinking is the upgraded brain software that operates on the data we call knowledge. It is the hallmark of an educated citizenry.
To appreciate nuance, to understand discord, to feel empathy, one must glean the facts and also listen to diverse perspectives. Read multiple newspapers, domestic and international; consider multiple websites from around the world; listen to news channels from the left, the middle, and the right; talk to people from different backgrounds. Above all, think critically about what you learn; ask questions; seek your answers supported by facts. Remember, not everyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto wrong; nor are you necessarily right if all your friends agree with you.
Cronkite knew that, as did Huntley and Brinkley. Each night, they and their compatriots did their best to bring the audience some unvarnished facts to ponder. They reserved editorial comment for rare and extraordinary occasions, and they labeled it explicitly as such, which gave it great power. Today, the best news organizations and high-quality information sources strive to do the same.
Yes, broadcast news stories were and are filtered by mainstream cultural bias, but they are the mainstream. Though not always right, the mainstream, then and now, is more than a neologism. It is a shared and evolving Weltanschauung created by the interplay of contrasting and often divergent perspectives, itself derived from broad communication and critical thinking. (See Shaping the Message, Using the Medium and Contemplative Reflection and Instantaneous Communication.)
And that’s the way it is, March 29th, 2022. Goodbye, Chet. Goodbye, David. And goodnight from HPCDan.
Thanks for the stroll down memory lane, especially the pre-college years. We have been through a lot of change. In my counselor training I was told that adjusting to change is a sign of mental health. I guess that makes us extremely well adjusted!
Posted by: Mike Wiles | April 01, 2022 at 01:06 PM