Back in the 50s and 60s, how did the networks broadcast national news across the country? That is, how did they get the programming to stations?
Terrestrial microvave links, coaxial cables and/or trucks rushing kinescope films westwards, I suspect.
Short answer - They didn’t bradcast national news.
National news came in “off the wire” - by Teletype. TV stations would have several Teletype machines clacking away - I don’t recall what the news services were back then, but they might have the equivalent of Associated Press and UPI, as well as their own corporate service, plus one dedicated to weather.
Any pictures to go along with the news were either photographs or movie film shot locally. The important national stories might be flown in, or put out on the network for the local stations to record and show later. “Live” was a foreign concept for any purpose other than a news anchor sitting at the desk. TV cameras then were enormous and enormously complicated fragile things that were not easily moved out of the studio.
As for distribution of programming, back then, there was far more reliance on local programming. A TV station might not get more than three or four hours of national programming a day in that era.
Interstingly enough, the phone company (AT&T’s Bell Labs, specifically) was key to most of the early transcontinental broadcasts as they invented, installed and controlled a national network of coaxial cables, as well as the terrestrial microwave links and satellites.
In 1951, AT&T’s new broadband coax system enabled the first live transcontinental TV broadcast
AT&T’s Telstar satellite was used for the first live trans-Atlantic broadcast in 1962.
Actual kinescopes reels weren’t shipped physically like that (not for too long anyway). The west coast network affiliates soon all had AT&T long line connections to the east. The kinescopes were created at the west coast stations, i.e. a film camera was pointed at a monitor showing the east coast feed in real time.
The films were then hurriedly developed, printed and (hopefully) broadcast within the three-hour delay (known as a “hot kinescope” very often because the film stock would still be warm from the drying process it just went thru after developing the print).
The phenomenal expense of all this was the driving force behind inventing a practical all-electronic video recorder.
This is palpably false. All of the networks had daily newscasts through most of the 1950s.
CBS Television News, 1948-1962
ABC Evening News, 1952-present
The Huntley-Brinkley Report 1956-1970
Why would you post this when later in your own post you present this correct information:
All that you said about the wire services and film was correct WRT to local news broadcasts, which up until the last couple of decades focused almost exclusively (strangely enough) on local news, not national or international news. That was left to the network news shows.
Let’s set a real timeline for Cagey Drifter who must be thoroughly confused by now.
In 1940 NBC stuck a big antenna on top of its station in Schenectady, NY, so it could pick up and retransmit programs that originated in New York City.
By 1946 NBC had connected its stations in NYC, Schenectady and Philadelphia, while DuMont had connected its stations in NYC and Washngton. By 1948, both networks had a more-or-less network of stations along the East Coast, and by early 1949 NBC had connected to Chicago and some other Midwestern cities. Stations which weren’t connected received programs that were kinescoped (and broadcast them whenever they got them.)
In 1951 the transcontinental coaxial link was finished, making coast-to-coast transmission possible.
The networks continued to use coaxial service almost exclusively until the mid-1970s.