CBS News deserves a medal! Every day we hear about book sections folding and the lack of interest surrounding literature, authors and publishing, and yet it is still one of the most influential and inspiring areas of our culture. It fills me with hope when I see news outlets adding book coverage to their schedules. Jeff Glor is the host of AUTHOR TALK, a place for authors and readers to come together and learn about what is going on in the world of books. Author Talk is “a place to find the best new books, and get answers directly from the authors who wrote them.”
The most recent book covered is WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins.
Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, reflects on Walter Cronkite’s death. Ritchie has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades.
The veteran news anchor Walter Cronkite died disappointed with the trends in network evening news programs since his retirement in 1981. Cronkite had aspired to make the CBS Evening News the New York Times of television, but after he left the air he thought the program went tabloid, reducing serious coverage of foreign and national events in favor of human interest stories, health and consumer reporting. He regarded this as “trivializing,” and lamented the general decline in standards of television news.
The root of problem was the limited time available for news in a half-hour format. Cronkite had begun anchoring when the network news had just fifteen minutes a night, following or preceding fifteen minutes of local news from the network’s affiliates. Over the Labor Day weekend in 1963, CBS inaugurated the half-hour format, featuring Cronkite interviewing President John F. Kennedy at Hyannisport. NBC used CBS’s initiative to overcome resistance from its own affiliates and expand its popular Huntley-Brinkley Report to a half hour. Soon afterwards, surveys showed that more Americans relied on TV than newspapers as their chief source of news. But even at a half hour, with seven minutes subtracted for commercials, there were only twenty-three minutes for news. Cronkite’s program devoted an average of eight minutes each night to its Washington bureau, whose stellar squad of correspondents–including Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, Marvin Kalb, Daniel Schorr, Nancy Dickerson, Bernard Shaw, and Leslie Stahl–jockeyed for air time. They boasted that their deadline of 6:30 PM EST became the deadline for the entire federal government.
Cronkite wanted to expand his news program to an hour, opening with hard news and then turning to lighter features. Even at the height of network domination in the 1960s and ‘70s, half of all television owners never bothered to watch the evening news and only one in fifty watched the network news every night. News drew its viewers from older, better-educated, middle- and upper-income professionals, who were disproportionately male. To expand their audience the networks needed to attract more women, racial and ethnic minorities, and younger people–consumers that advertisers were anxious to reach. The networks’ affiliates pioneered with local news programs heavy on crime, disaster, scandal, celebrities, and sports, which Cronkite dismissed as more show business than news reporting. No matter, local news grew so profitable that the affiliates resisted his efforts to expand network news to an hour.
The passing of the old era became evident as early as August 16, 1977, when Elvis Presley died. ABC News–being managed by the sports producer Roone Arledge–led off with Presley, while on CBS Cronkite opened with a report on the pending Panama Canal treaty. (Compare that to the way all of the networks covered Michael Jackson.) With Cronkite’s retirement, the local news approach finally penetrated the CBS Evening News. Cable networks challenged the three original networks–whose share of the news audience shrank from 98 percent in the 1960s to less than half today–and Cronkite lamented that too often the newcomers replaced sober news analysis with “polarizing diatribes.” He regretted that networks’ business managers replaced serious news documentaries with “trashy syndicated ‘news’ shows” on prime time. The Federal Communications Commission dropped the public service requirements for broadcast licensing, and the networks’ new corporate owners saw news budgets as ripe for trimming. CBS’s Washington bureau, which employed 21 correspondents at its peak under Cronkite, shrank to nine by the end of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, a new generation of news consumers was turning to the Internet as its major source, abandoning the evenings news along with the newspaper. The number of patent medicines sponsoring the evening news clearly demonstrate its aging demographics. “And that’s the way it is,” Cronkite had famously signed off his program, but what he saw of television news was not the way he wanted it to be.
Jon Gnagy was the first artist to draw pictures on television, and I was there! I mean, in front of the TV screen. I may not have been in school yet.
“We would both watch him and be spellbound,” my mother tells me.
Shadows and shading, the cube, the ball, the cylinder and the cone…
The lessons were simple, though dazzling as magic tricks for the millions of children who watched him.
Andy Warhol learned to draw from him, or so he said.
“Mr. Gnagy, who was self-taught, was an advertising art director in New York before offering weekly art courses on television in 1946. His NBC-TV program was called ”You Are An Artist.” He switched to CBS-TV in 1950,” reported the New York Times in his obituary.
He passed away on March 7, 1981 at the age of 74.
A plain-talking midwesterner, the son of Hungarian – Swiss Mennonites, Gnagy did attend some evening classes at the Kansas City Art Institute as a young man. He became a company art director who won prizes for his paintings and poster designs.
There’s a wonderful (2006) article about him at the Dali House blog by crackerjack arts writer and journalist Paul Dorsey.
Gnagy was not paid anything for the 700 telecasts he did over 14 years at the CBS and NBC networks, Dorsey says. His revenue came from royalties on the sales of millions of his art sets, “The John Gnagy Learn to Draw Outfit.”
I finally became the proud owner of one of these, at the age of six or seven. The kit had gray pastels to go with the black (and white) pastels and charcoal. The gray pastels were for stuff like shadows. That seemed terribly interesting and sophisticated to me.
Alas, I lacked the concentration to stay with most of his exercises. His subjects — barns in the woods and vegetable-filled baskets on toolshed tables — seemed a little overwhelming and hard. (I’d never be as good as him.) But, oh, how the thought of those lessons tantalized.
Maybe I should find another Learn to Draw set. (You can still buy them!)
Really buckle down this time.
Because it’s never too late to ponder the cube, the ball, the cylinder and the cone – ahh, and those marvelous snow shadows.
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Mark Mitchell, the host of “How To Be A Children’s Book Illustrator” is blogging tonight because he’s so behind in writing Session #12 of his course.
As many of you might already know, Lou Dorfsman, director of design and, later, senior VP at CBS for more than 40 years, died last Wednesday at the age of 90. From his NY Times obit:
Mr. Dorfsman’s work became a model for corporate communications, in the marketing discipline now called branding. In 1946, when he joined CBS as art director for its successful radio networks, the company was already a leader in both advertising and the relatively new field of corporate identity. Frank Stanton, then CBS’s president, understood the business value of sophisticated design and had earlier hired William Golden as the overall art director; in 1951 Golden designed the emblematic CBS eye, among the most identifiable logos in the world.
Mr. Dorfsman not only extended Golden’s aesthetic by combining conceptual clarity and provocative visual presentation, but developed his own signature style of graphic design.
Besides being in charge of the look & design for all of CBS, he also played a major role in the network’s headquarters on 52nd and Sixth Avenue in New York, the CBS Building. Along with architect Eero Saarinen, Lou was responsible for all of the “building’s graphics, designating the type, design and spacing for wall clocks, elevator buttons, and elevator inspection stickers.”
One interesting aspect of the building that Lou designed was a 35 ft. wide by 8 1/2 ft. tall wall for the building’s cafeteria, titled “Gastrotypographicalassemblage”. The wall has since been taken down, but there have been recent efforts to restore the wall to its original splendor by the non-profit organization The Center for Design Study. For more information on the wall and its restoration (as well as how you can donate) check the links:
Speak Up: The Wall That Lou Dorfsman Built
Honor the Legacy: Gastrotypographicalassemblage
The Center for Design Study’s Flickr showcases photos of the restoration in progress.
Great post Mark! I love watching these kinds of videos. I can only imagine how exciting it was to watch him back then! Thanks for posting the video!
JP
Thank you, JP!
Yeah, I love these kinds of demo videos, too.
I wish I had time to watch all the painting videos by guys like Bob Ross.
To me, these have all the suspense of watching someone walk a tightrope without a net. Extreme Sports.
Gnagy pioneered the genre for TV. I first saw him when I was about 3 and stayed a fan for years after that.