[RWood]

Many people call radio “television without a picture.” From our perspective, this is mostly true. A lot of us grew up with TV all around us. If not in out own house we knew someone up the street that had one or we saw the crowds outside the TV shop on Saturday morning watching Howdy Doody. “What time is it boys and girls?” (Wait for response, “Its Howdy Doody time!”)

More pervasive than any other medium before it, television spread faster than radio and in its brief existence has thoroughly replaced (and gutted) the prior dominant mediums.

Just as the oral tradition was captured to writing, (remember Homer and his odyssey?) manuscripts were turned into books, events were captured and preserved in newspapers, radio mined the books for entertainment and took to the forefront in news reporting, so too has television ingested these elements and spewed them back.

Some of the shows on today or that your parents watched while you grew up were direct extensions of the same show from radio - - Jack Benny started his show on radio in the 1930s, Amos & Andy from the 1920s, Death Valley Days from the 1940s, Have Gun Will Travel and Gunsmoke from the 1950s, game shows like Truth or Consequences from the 1940s, and the soap operas like The Edge of Night from who knows how long ago. The basic types of shows were established in radio and carry forward to this day. (They are always looking for a new type of show; they just haven’t found one that people will watch.) They are news, drama, western, quiz, talk, situational comedy, and variety. It helps if people are comfortable with what you present. This is why so many shows seem like something you have seen before.

Consider the ever-popular spin-off. I Love Lucy begot Andy Griffith that in turn begot Gomer Pyle, USMC. Green Acres was the Beverly Hillbillies in reverse. You get the picture. (Wait for groan.)

Television has replaced radio that replaced newspapers as the primary source of news for most people. It was TV that they turned to for information on the Kennedy assassinations, it was TV that they watched for the first man on the moon, and its TV that they are turning to now for information on the Nixon administration problems with “Watergate.” Radio has been reduced to playing prerecorded music - - top forty, underground/progressive, soul, wall-to-wall/easy listening, classical, R&B - - with a little discussion and the occasional listener call in show that nobody listens to anyway. News, if they have it at all, is a “rip-and-read” from the teletype that might go on for a minute or two at the hour and half hour mark. Some radio stations, like WMOD here in Washington, are completely automated and have no announcers on staff.

Television almost killed the movie business. Back in the early adoption period of the late 1940s and early 1950s attendance at movie theaters dropped significantly when a television station started in their area. The old 4:3 format of the films was just the same ratio as the television. Coincidence? No, designed that way on purpose. The film industry did fight back. First, they started making more movies in color since their patrons could not get color (yet) from their televisions. Second, they experimented with new wider formats like Cinemarama and Cinemascope. Some have suggested incorporating these formats into regular television. Experiments are on going but the current thinking is that the bandwidth requirements, how much frequency spectrum it would require, are too high. One report said they could do it but that they would need to combine three or four current channels to get the entire picture at once. That would reduce us to two television channels in Washington and require everyone to buy a new set. Don’t hold your breath.

All commercial media today is advertiser driven. The more ears and eyes you can deliver to an advertiser, the more you can charge. The key is delivering the right kind of people. Advertisers believe that the younger people are not as set in their buying habits as the older people. This is why most ads for soft drinks, cigarettes, and beer are skewed to younger people. When was the last time you saw anyone over 28 in a cigarette ad? Many products are interchangeable and the advertisers feel that you will buy the last one you saw advertised or the one you remember most - - cars are a great example as by last count only 28% bought the same brand of car again.

Now let’s look at advertising revenue. Over 53% of all ad dollars went to television. Radio picked up just 12.2% of the dollars. Even the newspapers did better than radio at 21.7%. The rest of the dollars were scattered over outdoor billboards, magazines, in house ads, and my favorite, other.

Radio had a few AM stations called “clear channel” because at night they had the power to reach most of the country and there were no local stations allowed to broadcast on the same frequency. WABC in New York and CKLW in Windsor, Ontario, Canada are two examples of this. Television signals are compressed to the horizon meaning that they can travel only as far as the horizon (with a little spill over) as seen from the top of their tower. (FM radio signals are also compressed to the horizon, AM is not.) This means that the stations signals are available only to the local community. If you happen to be in a valley or behind a large hill or mountain, you get no signal. To provide coverage a number of stations employ repeaters that will forward the signal to these unserved areas near them. In some parts of the country, residents have banded together and put up a series of antennas to capture the distant signals and distribute within the community. It is called Community Antenna Television or CATV for short. They are also proposing a similar system for New York City they are calling “Cable TV” because the tall buildings seem to reflect the signals resulting in a poor visual image.

So what is the current state of television? At the top of the food chain are the three major networks - - ABC, CBS, and NBC - - and their five owned and operated (O&O) stations. Each has their own news departments and produces a few shows themselves like Today. They are also fed by major production houses like Paramount Pictures, Screen Gems, and Hanna-Barbara. Below them are the smaller networks like Metromedia and United Broadcasting. There are also a lot of group station owners like Park Broadcasting, Post-Newsweek, and the Chicago Tribune. (Hint: in most cities there will be at least one radio and TV station owned by the local newspaper. Here in the Washington, DC area channel 7 (WMAL) is owned by the Evening Star and channel 9 (WTOP) is owned by the Washington Post.)

Next would be the network affiliates in each city, followed by the VHF (that’s channels 2 to 13) independents, and at the bottom of the pecking order would be the UHF (that’s channels 14 and up) independents.

It is an emerging world for television: signal strength is growing, pictures are clearer, more people are producing more programming for more stations, UHF stations are starting to get measurable ratings in some markets, CATV systems are growing, and there is a proposal to add a local channel to the NYC “Cable System.”

Now administrative things about the Department of Communications and the defined concentrations that you have open to you. It is a three-step process where you first apply to the College of Arts & Sciences and then declare the Department of Communications. From there you meet with an advisor and select a concentration in one of the following:

- Print Journalism
- Broadcast Journalism
- Film
- Television Production & Programming
- Media Studies

There is also a concentration in Speech that is jointly administered between the Department of Communications and the School of Business. If you have any questions please feel free to contact any of the teaching assistants or me after or outside of class.

There are a few additional books that I recommend to you in addition to The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley and The Silent Language by Ed Hall, they are The Medium is the Message and Understanding Media both by Marshall McLuhan. OK, fifteen-minute break followed by Q&A, and then team workshops.

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This is the end of the notes from 1974. I will add a 4th part at the same level bringing it up to the present and including the Internet. Remember that the closer we are to events the less able we are to judge the significance of the events we comment on and evaluate their importance. There are areas in this last part where events took a different turn than we expected then. Cable Television took off, the widescreen aspect of films has been incorporated into broadcast television, and everyone is now facing purchasing a new set, adding an adapter to their existing set, or receiving the signals through their cable or satellite provider.

This was given to a 100 level (freshman) class called "Introduction to Mass Media" in 1974. There exist another set of notes (that I have not found yet) for the same subject matter that were used in a 500 level (masters) class.