I’m watching CNN and it occured to me that every war I was old enough to know about while it was happening has come with 24 hour news coverage. So before the internet and dedicated news channels how were wars covered? Did normal TV stations interupt their programing more often for breaking news?
From what I can gather, the evening and nightly news were much more important back in the day. The news was serious and condensed into those time slots to give people information. Of course, that mainly applies to Vietnam. I have no idea how it worked on radio for WWII and WWI is even more of a mystery. At the time, they said that Gulf Way I circa 1991 was the first made for TV war.
Uncle Walter would tell us what was going on in Vietnam every night on the news; there were brief newsbreaks between shows; and more people relied on the coverage of newspapers and newsweeklies.
So, you guys had news programs that weren’t filled mainly with thinly-disguised promotions for new restaurants and cultural centers and whatnot?
I’m jealous.
No broadcast radio news during WW1.
Print news was heavily censored during the Great War.
Pre-television, much war news (and sports news) was presented via newsreels shown in movie theaters.
Back in the 60’s and 70’s the TV news was in the evening so you could watch the war while you ate dinner. There were usually several wars going on but the media would focus on only one or two of them. If there wasn’t much happening in the war zones sometimes the news would instead have footage of a famine, terrorist attack, or plane crash.
MUCH worse than now. In my day we didn’t have any of these sissy troop transports; we had to MARCH to every battle, up a hill both ways, barefoot over broken glass, with mongooses (mongeese?) (polygeese) (whatever) gnawing at our testicles the entire time. And we had to carve our own bullets.
Thats the way I remember it too. The Evening News was semi-sacred. Adults were not to be disturbed during the broadcast, and Uncle Walter was the High Priest of Broadcast News. There was film–not video, actual film–from Viet Nam, sometimes with fairly graphic content. When Nixon got caught, those hearings were always on in the afternoon when I got home from school…which truly upset me, as it pre-empted Buckskin Bill (human hosted cartoon local studio show–sorta like Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons), Gilligan’s Island, and Bugs Bunny. I also remember the day George Wallace got shot, because it was the same day my pet bunny died, and I didn’t understand why the news was talking about Wallace, but not my poor Hoppy Toes 
During World War II the radio networks did NOT broadcast nonstop war news, as shocking as it might seem now. Programs were interrupted only for the most urgent bulletins. Important bulletins might be broadcast between programs, but the war was pretty assigned to the regular news broadcasts.
Most of this was due to the sponsorship structure of the networks. Advertisers literally bought their time periods and decided on the programming.
The networks have always been conflicted about news vs. programming:
The House of Representatives held the vote to impeach Bill Clinton on a Saturday (December 19) in 1998. NBC, ABC, PBS and Fox carried the proceedings live. CBS, sticking to its contract with NFL football, carried their games, with brief updates.
In February 1965 CBS News President Fred Friendly resigned after network programmers overruled his decision to broadcast Congressional hearings about Vietnam and instead ran regular daytime programming.
In 2004, CBS fired a producer who interrupted the final minutes of CSI: New York to air a bulletin about the death of Yasser Arafat, rather than offering a report to the local newscasts which would start only a few minutes later in the Eastern and Central time zones.
I don’t mean to single out CBS – there are similar cases at all the networks.
You got important and gory coverage. You didn’t get 12 hours of reporters telling you they heard somthing from their hotel room. The news agencies had satelite feeds, but nobody could record with a vcr. You had to watch the news a supper time or miss it. The reporters and camera men were in the battles recording. I do enjoy being able to get the Europian news at present, because they cover stuff that doesn’t get into the news in the U.S.
Unfortunately, most of the Wikipedia entries for early radio are very inaccurate. (I’ve done some work on supplying corrections, but don’t currently have the time to do a complete job). Errors in the excerpt above include: 1) There was regular audio broadcasting as early as late-1916 (more below), 2) Some spark transmissions continued until the 1930s 3) 8MK was duly licenced as an amateur radio station. (There were no special requirements for a broadcasting station at this time).
Lee DeForest’s experimental station, 2XC, in the Highbridge section of New York City, began nightly broadcasts in the Fall of 1916. World War One had already started in Europe, and a report in the November 18, 1916 Electrical Review and Western Electrician, News and Music to Be Transmitted by Wireless Telephone, noted that the programming included “War bulletins and important world happenings, interspersed in a nightly musical program”. Other contemporary reports about this station include Wireless Transmission of News, from the December 30, 1916 Telephony, which quotes DeForest as saying: “Personally I can see no reason why the wireless telephone transmission of news in the near future will not be a regular means of communication, and a very valuable one, too, in supplementing by bulletin the various editions issued by the metropolitan newspapers. All that is needed is the news, and a comparatively few, well-located, high-power stations capable of covering the entire country. Already we have in the United States, I should say, at least 200,000 amateur wireless outfits waiting to receive news and music by the wireless telephone.” and Election Returns Flashed by Radio to 7,000 Amateurs. However, when the United States entered WWI in April, 1917, it took over the entire radio industry, so stations like 2XC were shut down. (The government also made it illegal for all civilians to even possess an operational radio receiver during the war).
After WWI ended the U.S. radio industry returned to civilian control, and through 1922 there was increasing amount of news available via broadcasting stations. Then the Associated Press stepped in to greatly restrict radio news offerings, which sparked the “Radio-Press War”. So, until the mid-1930s, in the US there were very limited news offerings available via radio. (See, America’s press-radio war of the 1930s: a case study in battles between old and new media for more details).
I recall the day that broadcast news “changed forever”: January 16, 1991. I was sitting in my bedroom flipping through the TV channels looking for something to watch, when I stopped on CNN. At that time, CNN was merely “that cable channel that does news 24 hours a day”; network news was still king. I’m not sure why I even lingered there for more than a second; I probably heard the words “bombing” or “explosions” and thought “What’s that?”
So I wound up spending all night long staring at a static image on the TV: A map of Iraq with three staff photos of reporters along one side of the screen. There was no video, not even still pictures, just audio from the three reporters, but it was enough to change TV news forever.
The local NBC affiliate (KCRA, “Where the News Comes First”) actually broadcast the CNN feed that evening instead of the NBC news. I recall that being unprecedented at the time.
Hmmm…I’d link the development of CNN to the success of Ted Koppel and Nightline that started during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. That’s the first regular, “supplemental news broadcast” I remember.
Going back a bit further, it’s interesting to see news reporting’s first effect on the conduct of war: compare the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo in 1815 with the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War 39 years later.
Both were examples of cavalry charges that went too far and/or in the wrong direction. But the charge at Waterloo cost some regiments 90% casualties, while the Light Brigade only suffered 15%. However, William Howard Russell of the London Times was on a hill watching the Light Brigade, and within days everyone in Great Britain became an armchair general under whose command such things could never happen.
Since Great Britain was not an autocracy, the real generals had to adapt. In 1815, common soldiers were “the scum of the earth,” but by 1915 the officers creed was “trust in your men.”
However, we aren’t spoon-fed just enough information to make us overconfident experts as we were before CNN. Although our current president may feel as confident as Woodrow Wilson in having his fellow Yalies re-draw the world’s maps, anyone with basic cable and basic IQ are too well informed for that. I’m afraid we may all simply throw up our hands in confused dispair, and the generals will go back to charging too far and in the wrong direction.
the biggest difference between reporting now and “back in the old days” (say, the 1970’s) is in one word :ENTERTAINMENT.
In the early years, (when TV was black and white), and later when Walter Cronkite ended each newcast with the words “And that’s the way it is”, the news was serious.
The news did not begin with 2 minutes of snazzy graphics and bouncy music. There was no male/female team smiling at each other, placing a light hand on the shoulder and making cute banter like a couple chatting at home.
And TV in general was less all-emcompassing in our lives. We turned on the tv for a specific purpose–to watch a comedy, or to watch the news, and people knew the difference.
Today, there is only a thin line between news and entertainment.
that isn’t always the case in 1991 there was a massive explosion in Iran during the Gulf War. CBS interrupted Jokers Wild for a bulletin but the other channels stayed with the talk shows when video was ready to be fed they preempted Jokers Wild as well as the talk shows for wall to wall coverage since it inloved American casualties
The Evening News of Vietnam has been covered.
Not certain if the ‘Today’s Body Count’ has been mentioned:
NV - 10,000
VC - 20,000
SV - 400
US - 15
In 1972 (IIRC) somebody calculated that the war must be over - we had killed every man, woman, and child in both North Vietnam AND South Vietnam.
Back to WWII: I was once (long before the WWW) that the US civilians never saw a picture of a dead GI until 1943 - dead Germans, Brits, etc. - but the US NEVER lost a single man.
DoD learned from Viet Nam (old styling): NEVER let news people accompany soldiers in battle: the resulting news turned public opinion against war.
I am old enough to know that prime time programs were only interrupted for the most urgent bulletins(daytime shows they might interrupt more often like soaps and game shows) what I do remember if there was a interruption during prime time they would resume the program at the point of the interruption you never see that with the soaps but I guess prime time is a bigger deal to the networks than daytime is
On a slight tangent, my mother served in WW2 as a Wren (Women’s Royal Naval Service) and was fascinated by the series The World at War when it aired in the early 70s.
It explained so much about what was happening during the war that she never knew about at the time…