Revolutions in Communication

From the roof of the nine story Westinghouse K Building at the East Pittsburgh Works, radio station KDKA first covered the 1920 presidential  election a century ago. Westinghouse publicity claimed the election night broadcast was “a national sensation,” but that is only part of the story.   In fact, three other embryonic ratio stations were also broadcasting the election results that night —  the Detroit News’ “Radiophone” service, a temporary Saint Louis Post-Dispatch radio station, and the Buffalo Evening News broadcast through an affiliated with an amateur station.

The fact that KDKA is best remembered is probably because the station was a leader in radio technology with pioneering engineer Frank Conrad and also that the content of the broadcast was better organized with the help of Duquense University. About 1,000 people heard the election results in Pittsburg, thanks to Conrad’s suffragette wife, Flora, who helped organize listening parties. Flora had something to celebrate that night too. It was the first national election where women could vote.

Eugene Patterson was an editor for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution when he wrote this editorial of Sept. 16, 1963, a day after the notorious 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four children. The editorial is a classic in American journalism and probably the best of the 20th century.  

“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.

It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.

Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children’s bodies.

We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.

We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.

We — who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.

We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.

We — the heirs of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition — we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable, caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would die.

This is no time to load our anguish onto the murderous scapegoat who set the cap in dynamite of our own manufacture.

He didn’t know any better.

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Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour now anchors the show from home.

The visual design of television news is becoming less busy, says Hunter Schwarz in an article in  Eye on Design as the coronavirus has shifted us into new ground.

“Guests no longer speak to us in front of in-studio green screens with professional makeup and lighting, but are instead beamed in from home offices on laptop cameras.

Walter Cronkite, radio news anchor, made the switch to TV news in the 1940s, before green screens and chyrons.

Historically, the busy visual design with fast moving graphics has only been with us a few decades.  In the early years, Schwarz says,  TV news wasn’t much to look at.    “The guys who started off in the television news business were radio guys,” said Bill Kovarik, a professor at Radford University and author of Revolutions in Communication. “There were not a lot of visual artists to start out with.”

Setting type at the Chicago Defender, 1941.

Resistance to injustice, bearing witness to the suffering of the innocent,  never  lacking sympathy for the poor — these have always been among the  sacred duties of the press, and no newspaper has  performed  with more courage and intelligence than the Chicago Defender.

The announcement that the news organization will stop printing its 114-year old print edition, and switch to online-only publication, is not unusual in the news business these days, but it does mark the passing of an era and a moment for reflection on the status of the African American press.

When over 100 African Americans were killed and thousands of homes burned during in the East St. Louis riots in July, 1917,  only the African American press, especially the Chicago Defender, covered the eyewitness accounts of brutality by white mobs.  The same is true of many other major riots and incidents. Continue reading →