How I was introduced to broadcast media life
There is no truth to the rumour that, when I was a college freshman, we got our news by telegraph. Teletype yes, telegraph, no. In those long-ago days I edited UPI news feeds (when they were literally fed from the teletype) and read news for the college radio station.
My first exposure to the shortcomings of broadcast media was during the Northeast electrical blackout in November, 1965. During this nearly-forgotten crisis, pretty much all of the northeast media was struck mute. It was barely three years since the Cuban missile crisis, and any amount of speculation about nuclear holocaust was plausible. While we were off the air, our speculations were our own and harmed no one else. Bit by bit, news came through. The college got up some emergency power. Wiser heads at the radio station used (landline) phones to poke around until they found people with information. The situation would have dissipated sooner had the media we contacted not also been giving vent to baseless speculation.
Fast forward to the following May. The featured performer for the spring concert was to be Pete Seeger. The folk movement had been sufficiently homogenised at that time for the administration to consider him a benign elder-statesman folkie. Hence the college's imprimatur.
Seeger, of course, had never been that benign, and by the spring of 1966, the peace movement had grown in proportion to the war in Vietnam. My college was barely ten miles from an Air Force base. The local peace movement scheduled a picket line outside the base the day Seeger was to arrive. They recruited Seeger's participation, and after the demonstration at the base, the whole party walked to our campus. There were about 30 people in the party, most of them local talent.
All this was well-known; we had reported on it ourselves. This was a fairly conservative campus, especially in those remote days before almost everything that defines "the sixties" in popular myth had happened. The frat brothers vowed to give "the commies" a warm welcome. Cynical broadcasters that we were, we gave right and wrong little thought, but concentrated on setting up a live remote to cover the expected confrontation.
The demonstrators arrived in town and walked peaceably up Main Street to the student union, where they planned a brief statement. They were outnumbered about 20 to 1 by the frat boys and other loutish riff-raff of the student body. At the bottom of the hill where the student union still stands, the demonstrators halted and faced the hostile crowd, at least half of them drunk on this Thursday afternoon: nothing wrong with their courage. There were local and state police present, quite impartial but just as outnumbered by the the crowd.
I was stuck guarding the equipment and didn't see clearly what happened next. Someone amongst the demonstrators began to speak (unaided: no wireless mics back then). Rumour later said it was Pete Seeger: I think now it was more likely one of the faculty demonstrators. In response, the crowd surged forward, hurling epithets and rotten eggs, intent on mauling "the commies." We then had a good demonstration of how the mere presence of a couple of dozen police can cool a crowd's jets. The jets were decidedly cooled. The leaders got no closer than 20 feet to the demonstrators; eggs vanished into pockets or fell to the ground ("not mine, Officer"). There were more speeches and, at some point, Seeger did speak. The would-be defenders of American freedom simply got bored and steadily drifted away.
We were not the only news crews there. They began to drift off as well, whilst we stuck around to the rather tedious end. This was a mistake. By the time we got back to the station, in the basement of the student union a few dozen yards away, the teletype was going berserk, carrying stories about the "riot" in Durham. Our senior announcers hit the phones, calling the wire services and all the major news media within 300 miles, offering eyewitness accounts of what actually happened. It was no go: the slinkers had beaten us and the "riot" was established fact. The best we managed was to get one of the wires to modify its lead to "peace has been restored to Durham after a wild night of rioting..." a couple of hours after we started damage control.
It is easy to recall this formative episode today, in the aftermath of Vancouver's sorry riots, which show the opposite: how a few hundred drunks can quickly get the upper hand over law enforcement. It also shows the same, now old, story, of how today's media become enablers, letting the few hundred idiots control the narrative for a city of over 600,000. During morning errands and en route to work, I heard and read breathless narratives about how the natives of Vancouver were burning their city to the ground in inchoate rage. (That is only the thinnest of exaggerations.)*
Fortunately I have other sources. Years ago I worked remotely with a man from Vancouver, a devoted Canucks fan who is also able to keep sport and life separate. We've enjoyed a good-natured repartee about the Bruins and Canucks for most of our association. Even before I had encountered the worst of the post-Game 7 media hysteria, I had read B's courteous email of congratulations.
Later, I saw more from him and his other friends, from Vancouver and elsewhere in Canada. So far from torching the city, they were suggesting dumping the perps into a nearby (shark-infested) creek. There's disappointment in the outcome, of course. The anger is directed at the people who have spoilt the memory of the Canucks' very successful season and again sullied their city's reputation. Other shoes will drop, I'm sure, but that's their business, not mine.
Most people who get their news in the usual ways don't have my good luck. They don't have friends in Vancouver, and their view of the broadcast media wasn't permanently warped at age 19. What will they think?
-------------------------------
* The highest comedy of the morning came from Boston online commenters who said (so help me) that we wouldn't have rioted in the streets had the Canucks won Game 6 here; wouldn't have booed as they were presented the Stanley Cup in the Garden; would have all been good little boys and girls and gone home. Umm, what are you smokin', mate?
My first exposure to the shortcomings of broadcast media was during the Northeast electrical blackout in November, 1965. During this nearly-forgotten crisis, pretty much all of the northeast media was struck mute. It was barely three years since the Cuban missile crisis, and any amount of speculation about nuclear holocaust was plausible. While we were off the air, our speculations were our own and harmed no one else. Bit by bit, news came through. The college got up some emergency power. Wiser heads at the radio station used (landline) phones to poke around until they found people with information. The situation would have dissipated sooner had the media we contacted not also been giving vent to baseless speculation.
Fast forward to the following May. The featured performer for the spring concert was to be Pete Seeger. The folk movement had been sufficiently homogenised at that time for the administration to consider him a benign elder-statesman folkie. Hence the college's imprimatur.
Seeger, of course, had never been that benign, and by the spring of 1966, the peace movement had grown in proportion to the war in Vietnam. My college was barely ten miles from an Air Force base. The local peace movement scheduled a picket line outside the base the day Seeger was to arrive. They recruited Seeger's participation, and after the demonstration at the base, the whole party walked to our campus. There were about 30 people in the party, most of them local talent.
All this was well-known; we had reported on it ourselves. This was a fairly conservative campus, especially in those remote days before almost everything that defines "the sixties" in popular myth had happened. The frat brothers vowed to give "the commies" a warm welcome. Cynical broadcasters that we were, we gave right and wrong little thought, but concentrated on setting up a live remote to cover the expected confrontation.
The demonstrators arrived in town and walked peaceably up Main Street to the student union, where they planned a brief statement. They were outnumbered about 20 to 1 by the frat boys and other loutish riff-raff of the student body. At the bottom of the hill where the student union still stands, the demonstrators halted and faced the hostile crowd, at least half of them drunk on this Thursday afternoon: nothing wrong with their courage. There were local and state police present, quite impartial but just as outnumbered by the the crowd.
I was stuck guarding the equipment and didn't see clearly what happened next. Someone amongst the demonstrators began to speak (unaided: no wireless mics back then). Rumour later said it was Pete Seeger: I think now it was more likely one of the faculty demonstrators. In response, the crowd surged forward, hurling epithets and rotten eggs, intent on mauling "the commies." We then had a good demonstration of how the mere presence of a couple of dozen police can cool a crowd's jets. The jets were decidedly cooled. The leaders got no closer than 20 feet to the demonstrators; eggs vanished into pockets or fell to the ground ("not mine, Officer"). There were more speeches and, at some point, Seeger did speak. The would-be defenders of American freedom simply got bored and steadily drifted away.
We were not the only news crews there. They began to drift off as well, whilst we stuck around to the rather tedious end. This was a mistake. By the time we got back to the station, in the basement of the student union a few dozen yards away, the teletype was going berserk, carrying stories about the "riot" in Durham. Our senior announcers hit the phones, calling the wire services and all the major news media within 300 miles, offering eyewitness accounts of what actually happened. It was no go: the slinkers had beaten us and the "riot" was established fact. The best we managed was to get one of the wires to modify its lead to "peace has been restored to Durham after a wild night of rioting..." a couple of hours after we started damage control.
It is easy to recall this formative episode today, in the aftermath of Vancouver's sorry riots, which show the opposite: how a few hundred drunks can quickly get the upper hand over law enforcement. It also shows the same, now old, story, of how today's media become enablers, letting the few hundred idiots control the narrative for a city of over 600,000. During morning errands and en route to work, I heard and read breathless narratives about how the natives of Vancouver were burning their city to the ground in inchoate rage. (That is only the thinnest of exaggerations.)*
Fortunately I have other sources. Years ago I worked remotely with a man from Vancouver, a devoted Canucks fan who is also able to keep sport and life separate. We've enjoyed a good-natured repartee about the Bruins and Canucks for most of our association. Even before I had encountered the worst of the post-Game 7 media hysteria, I had read B's courteous email of congratulations.
Later, I saw more from him and his other friends, from Vancouver and elsewhere in Canada. So far from torching the city, they were suggesting dumping the perps into a nearby (shark-infested) creek. There's disappointment in the outcome, of course. The anger is directed at the people who have spoilt the memory of the Canucks' very successful season and again sullied their city's reputation. Other shoes will drop, I'm sure, but that's their business, not mine.
Most people who get their news in the usual ways don't have my good luck. They don't have friends in Vancouver, and their view of the broadcast media wasn't permanently warped at age 19. What will they think?
-------------------------------
* The highest comedy of the morning came from Boston online commenters who said (so help me) that we wouldn't have rioted in the streets had the Canucks won Game 6 here; wouldn't have booed as they were presented the Stanley Cup in the Garden; would have all been good little boys and girls and gone home. Umm, what are you smokin', mate?
Labels: hockey, media criticism, Vancouver Canucks
posted by Uncle | 22:18
2 Comments:
Ooo, WABAC. I had forgotten teletypes. I worked dailies in college and afterward. I hated the noise of the line printers in the teletype room. I think up to eight at a time beat like competing machine guns. I loved pulling the copy off the AP's D wire though, the one with filler items, weird and amusing short featurettes. Invariably most of those got spiked. I think a J school prof said over 90% of wire copy did. Working there was a like being in a secret society with ever changing lore.
Since you worked print, you missed one amusing game, which we'd call today "punk the news announcer." This involved staff members of either gender stripping and/or getting it on in front of the news booth, pouring shots, feeding comic tapes into the headphones, etc: anything to crack up the newsie. Announcers unwise enough to read their wire copy from a long scroll were likely to get it set afire from behind. Small wonder we took a peace march in stride.
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