Face the Nation: My Favorite Stories From The First 50 Years Of The Award-Winning News Broadcast - Softcover

Schieffer, Bob

 
9781476789675: Face the Nation: My Favorite Stories From The First 50 Years Of The Award-Winning News Broadcast
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476789673 ISBN 13: 9781476789675
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In this engaging memoir of television news and its unique place in history, New York Times bestselling author and Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer takes us behind the scenes of the Sunday morning institution that has provided a window on the most memorable events of the last half-century.
With his critically acclaimed memoir This Just In, Schieffer proved himself a natural storyteller, a gifted writer able to capture the workings of television news with remarkable wit and insight. Now Schieffer focuses his keen reporter's eye on 50 years of Face the Nation's live broadcasts and the historic moments the program has captured. From its 1954 debut, an interview with Senator Joe McCarthy the day before the Senate debate that would condemn him, to the broadcast's 1957 groundbreaking interview with a candid and controversial Nikita Khrushchev; from the brilliant analysis of communism made by guest Martin Luther King Jr. to the sometimes stunning, always revealing interviews with each sitting president; from the heroic and moving coverage of the terrorist attacks of September 11 to the revolutionary coverage of the war in Iraq, Schieffer shares unforgettable anecdotes about the guests, the stories and the events captured by the venerable public affairs program.
Marked by the author's candid personal observations and wise, good humor, and featuring a special companion DVD of broadcast highlights created by CBS News for this edition, Bob Schieffer's look at 50 years of Face the Nation shines an entertaining and nostalgic light on America's presidents, culture, foreign policy and domestic affairs.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bob Schieffer has been a chief Washington correspondent for CBS News and the anchor and moderator of Face the Nation until his retirement in 2015. Among his many honors are six Emmys. In 2002, he was named Broadcaster of the Year by the National Press Foundation and was elected to the Broadcasting Hall of Fame. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You on TV and The Acting President (with Gary Paul Gates).

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Chapter One: In the Beginning

Stanton and Paley Invent CBS News

It is a marvelous and frightening instrument, broadcasting, as part of this marvelous and frightening century. But ordinary men must use it as ordinary men have made this century what it is. Bad men can use it to their advantage, but in free societies, only for a time -- and a shorter time, I think, than in previous eras.

The camera's unblinking eye sees through character faster than the printed word.

Eric Sevareid on his retirement, November 28, 1977

Face the Nation was Frank Stanton's idea. Stanton always knew what he wanted -- and what CBS seemed to need. CBS News had more or less invented radio news during World War II, and Edward R. Murrow's See It Now programs had set the standard for television documentaries. What CBS did not have in 1954, and what Stanton felt it needed, was something to compete with NBC's Meet the Press, a live interview program that had the habit of generating the news that wound up as headlines in newspapers on Monday morning.

Stanton had been known as the boy wonder of broadcasting. He was an obscure, 27-year-old psychology professor at Ohio State University when CBS founder William S. Paley discovered him in 1935. Ten years later, when Paley named him president of the network, some outside the industry would occasionally mistake him for an intern because of his youthful good looks. But that was a mistake only outsiders made. Insiders knew him as Paley's right-hand man, though a polar opposite of Paley.

Stanton was a workaholic before the term was coined. Unlike the flamboyant Paley, who traveled with the jet set of his day and spent much of the year at his homes around the world, Stanton usually worked seven days a week; he socialized with few people and never with Paley. He did not particularly like the CBS chairman. But together, it was Paley, the charming showman and salesman, and Stanton, the cold, cerebral loner, who built the broadcasting giant that became known as the Tiffany network.

It was Paley's network, but those on the inside knew it was Stanton -- as much as Paley -- who had made it what it was. Don Hewitt, the 60 Minutes creator, told me about one night when he was being given one of the many awards that he received throughout his illustrious career.

"I looked down from the head table and saw Stanton in the audience," Hewitt said. "And I told the guy sitting next to me, 'Frank Stanton should be getting this award -- he should get every broadcasting award because he is the patron saint of this industry. He had more to do with making it what it became than any other individual."

To be sure, he was the patron saint of Face the Nation. CBS had never been able to put together the kind of forum where key newsmakers could be interviewed on the news of the week. A year earlier, Murrow had begun Person to Person, a program in which he sat in a New York studio, chain-smoking cigarettes, and "interviewed" celebrities in their homes that could be seen before him on a huge screen.

Person to Person was a fairly remarkable technical achievement for its day. Bulky television cameras could not be easily moved, and banks of lights had to be installed in various rooms of the celebrity homes. The broadcasts had to be carefully rehearsed as the celebrities walked on cue from room to room. Along the way, they introduced Murrow to various family members and pointed out interesting pieces of furniture.

During one program, the duke and duchess of Windsor played jacks on a coffee table. They tossed the ball, and Murrow chuckled, perhaps because he knew that anything beyond jacks would have been an intellectual challenge for the couple or, more likely, because he owned a piece of the show. It was a far cry from Murrow's serious journalism, but as a reward to some of his loyal longtime staffers, he arranged for them to share in the profits, a deal that allowed them to make far more than their CBS News salaries.

Person to Person had become a hit with viewers, but it was not what Stanton had in mind when he scheduled a lunch with Paley in early 1954 to talk about a new program to compete with Meet the Press on Sunday afternoons.

That it was Stanton who would see the need for that kind of program was not surprising. By 1954, Stanton had become the leading advocate for news among the CBS hierarchy. It was Paley who had built the entertainment side of CBS, Stanton who had kept the books and, more important, kept the company out of trouble with the government in what was then a carefully regulated industry. It was Stanton who had seen to it that CBS complied with government- mandated obligations to perform certain public service in return for use of the public airwaves.

When Stanton came to Paley's attention in 1935, few, including Paley, would have guessed that Stanton would be given so much responsibility. What had caught Paley's attention was young Professor Stanton's Ph.D. dissertation. It carried a daunting title, "A Critique of Present Methods and a New Plan for Studying Radio Listening Behavior." The title might have discouraged the average reader, but Paley was no ordinary reader. He understood exactly what Stanton was exploring: why people react positively to some radio programs and negatively to others. Paley had already built a successful radio network with seed money from his father's cigar factory. If Stanton could show him how to get more people to listen, that was news he could use.

Years before he hired Stanton, Paley had concluded that radio was the next great advertising medium. He had watched cigar sales at his father's factory increase from 400,000 a day to more than a million a day when his father advertised on an early radio show. If you could do that with cigars, Paley decided, then it could be done with other products. Rather than sell cigars, Paley wanted to create a place that sold advertising to the people who made the cigars and other products. Paley had begun with 12 struggling radio stations. By 1935, his network had grown to 97 stations and had introduced America to such talents as Bing Crosby and Kate Smith. His stations carried programs from as far away as the South Pole when the explorer Admiral Byrd had beamed back progress reports on his expedition to Paley's network. By then, Paley's network had more listeners than either the Red or Blue networks, which NBC owned, and it was a robust business, turning a profit that year of $2,810,079, more than either of the NBC outlets.

Paley wanted Stanton to help him understand who was listening to the radio, what they liked and what they didn't and, most important, what kinds of programs would draw more people to listen. And then there was that new medium, television -- radio with pictures. Paley wanted to know what its potential was. Stanton, he believed, could help him determine that.

CBS had begun experimental TV broadcasts in 1931 and by the end of the year was broadcasting seven hours of programming a day.

Nothing if not a salesman, when Paley made up his mind to go after Stanton, he pulled out all the stops. He sent a telegram to the young professor that began, "I don't know of any other organization where your background and experience would count so heavily in your favor or where your talents would find so enthusiastic a reception."

Three days later, Stanton accepted Paley's offer, drove to New York in his Model A Ford and settled in as the number three man in a three-man audience research office. His salary was $55 a week.

Stanton's responsibilities grew quickly. In ten years, he had become CBS president, and by 1954, when he began to think about creating the program that became Face the Nation, he had become the respected voice who spoke for an entire...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476789673
ISBN 13 
9781476789675
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
49084
Deutschland

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