[ad_1]
After the terrorist attacks against September 11, 2001, the three major broadcast networks remained on the air with 24-hour coverage for five consecutive days.
Back then, the network’s news divisions were still defined by their star anchors – Dan Rather on CBS, Tom Brokaw on NBC and Peter Jennings on ABC – all of whom have become familiar faces after years of providing information to viewers’ living rooms every night. Their relationship with the audience was established by looking directly at the camera in times of crisis.
Anchors were considered heroes during that week, bringing calm to a troubled nation. But the tragedy was also a watershed moment for cable news channels, which were always seen as disruptors in the television industry, when they introduced a simple innovation – headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen – that helped change the way people viewed news.
Jonathan Glenn, then editor for Fox News, remembers receiving a call from his bosses hours after live coverage of the network of planes that struck the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the crash of ‘a fourth plane hijacked in Pennsylvania. Their instructions were to display a ticker at the bottom of the screen with constantly updated titles.
“It was the most heartbreaking story we’ve seen, and there was such a flood of information and a need to get it out. Everyone needed to know more, ”said Glenn, now Fox News vice president of editorial and styling. “We just wanted to get out of it as much as possible. So we started to put titles at the bottom of the screen. It was a way to provide viewers with more information, to give them as much as we could possibly confirm at that point. “
Within hours, CNN and MSNBC were also running their own versions at the bottom of their screens.
Neal Shapiro, then president of NBC News, recalls having to hire his standards executive to write the ticker copy because no one else was available.
Viewers used to see a ticker at the bottom of the screen to get sports scores on ESPN, stock prices on the commercial channel CNBC, and messages from what is now known as the Alert System. emergency. But for the news, the information came mainly from the presenter or the correspondent on the screen.
“News on TV didn’t use the screen as much before 9/11,” recalls Shapiro, now director of New York’s PBS station WNET.
After broadcast networks reverted to their regular programming, cable news has stuck with the story of 9/11 and its aftermath.
In the weeks that followed, the ticker became a means of covering other stories squeezed out by the 9/11 tragedy. It has remained a staple for years, helping cable news become more ubiquitous.
“We’ve seen a lot of pictures of people watching muted TVs in restaurants or sports bars; everywhere they looked for that blanket, ”Glenn said. “Even if you were in a crowded restaurant, you would see this crawl and you would have an idea of what is going on.”
The ticker helped define the look of cable news, helping it stand out in a television landscape where choices proliferated. Soon he appeared in portrayals of television news in movies and scripted shows.
Glenn said Fox News employed up to nine full-time editors to generate ticker copy over the next 20 years. It was withdrawn in April because the network believed that the ability of viewers to instantly receive headlines from smartphone alerts rendered the graph obsolete.
“When it started, I don’t think I even had a BlackBerry,” he said. “I definitely had a pager. That was it.”
MSNBC has also abandoned full-time teleprinter use, focusing more on correspondents and on-air hosts. The ticker has reappeared for major ongoing stories, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd and the 2020 presidential election.
CNN, where people who aren’t regular cable news viewers often go for the big breaking stories, still use the ticker full-time.
But the ticker remains a holdover from how the most shocking story of our time changed a public habit forever. It had already happened.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, ABC, CBS and NBC were broadcast 24 hours a day for four consecutive days, until the funeral of the 35th President. It was a turning point for news broadcasts, which overtook newspapers as the main source of information for the country.
When the broadcast networks reverted to regular programming after their uninterrupted coverage of 9/11, viewers who still wanted real-time news found that the cable news was still being broadcast. In the years that followed, a growing number of viewers made cable news their first stop for breaking news, and have been doing so ever since.
“There was a week where the world seemed really uncertain in a fundamental way, and the big three mainstream networks were there to cover it for you, and then they stopped to go back to their normal pattern,” Shapiro said. “In cable news, the public has found a place to keep that 24/7 coverage.”
[ad_2]
Source link