Terry Anzur - Inventing TV News. Live and Local in Los Angeles.

Inventing TV News

Live and Local in Los Angeles

Terry Anzur

Copyright 2022 Theresa Marie Anzur

All rights reserved.

The bare light bulb came on automatically as I stepped through the doorway of the musty basement. I made my way across the uneven cement floor, avoiding a large, dead cockroach. Dust-covered boxes partially blocked my path to the rusty file cabinets against the back wall. Pulling open a drawer, I found yellowed folders of crumbling newspaper clippings and office memos. Glossy black-and-white photographs were stuck together in useless clumps. Judging from the dampness and the mold, the place had been flooded at one time and then abandoned.

Above me, the busy KTLA TV newsroom hummed with the routine of reporting the days top stories. I was the co-anchor of the stations 10 oclock newscast. At the same time, I was holding down a second job teaching broadcast journalism at the University of Southern California. I was certainly the first and probably the last tenure-track faculty member to appear on billboards all over Los Angeles as one of the authentic LA faces of News at Ten. But that fun fact wasnt going to help me win tenure at the prestigious Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

I had been advised that broadcasting nightly on an award-winning, top-rated news program didnt count as publishing in my field. In 1997, the school had not yet established a professional track for experienced journalists lacking a traditional PhD. I was going to have to earn tenure the old-fashioned way: publish or perish. KTLAs management had given me permission to look through the basement archives in my spare time. I quickly realized I had access to a treasure trove of primary source documents on the early development of local TV news in Los Angeles. For the next three years, I did research by reading the files and interviewing both retired and active KTLA colleagues. They kindly shared their personal recollections.

Local television news has been notoriously unkind to its past. Some early TV shows were preserved on film kinescopes. But local news programs, aired primarily as a public service obligation and of no value in the syndication market, usually were not considered worth saving. After videotape was invented in the late 1950s, the bulky two-inch reels and three-quarter-inch cassettes presented a costly storage problem. News videotapes were recorded over or thrown away as stations changed hands. News film was recycled for the silver. Much of the early history of local TV news survives only in the memories of the people who launched this industry and the paper trail they left behind. For the broadcast journalism historian, this means a race not only against the clock but also against the short-term memory of a business that values the ratings for the next big story over the lessons that could be learned from the past.

Broadcast historians have focused on the achievements of national news divisions at the three major US broadcasting networks, mostly overlooking significant developments at the local level. As my USC colleague and academic mentor Joe Saltzman has noted, the Great Television Networksthose who work for them, watch them and criticize themconsider local television much as a dog considers fleas: an annoying, insignificant, brutally tiresome fact of life.

Some scholars present local television news primarily as the competitor that killed the evening newspaper, ignored vital community issues, valued happy talk over substance, and reduced political discourse to something less than a 15-second sound bite. Such criticism fails to credit local television news for what it does well. For live coverage of breaking news, and especially when a community is coping with natural disaster or man-made calamity, local TV news has no equal. The networks can't be everywhere; they initially rely on their local station affiliates when news breaks. In virtually every American city, there is fierce rivalry among local TV news stations. They remain intensely competitive even when there is only one surviving newspaper in the community they serve.

The battle between independent stations KTLA and KTTV in the early days encouraged technological innovation. Led by the visionary Klaus Landsberg, KTLA pioneered live, on-the-scene reporting from the ground and from the air, even bringing the atomic bomb into Americas living rooms when the national networks said it couldnt be done. These achievements have been well documented in books by legendary KTLA reporter Stan Chambers and journalist Evelyn DeWolfe, who was married to Landsberg during KTLAs formative years. I wanted to add to this KTLA-centered version of local TV news history by placing it in a wider context.

I read contemporary newspaper accounts of the same events, noting what print journalists and critics thought of the TV coverage by all of the competing stations in Los Angeles. I also viewed the actual programs that were available in the archives at UCLA and the Museum of Broadcasting. When the programs were not preserved it was necessary to reconstruct the coverage from newspaper and eyewitness accounts, as well as interviews with actual participants. There is no invented dialog. Any quotations are from a recording or a published source, or the exact words as remembered by someone who was there.

Lets open those rusty file cabinets and revisit the invention of live and local television news in Los Angeles:

Everyones Child, 1949: The race to rescue three-year-old Kathy Fiscus from an abandoned well pipe was the first unscheduled breaking news event to be covered by two competing TV stations with live remote capability. The broadcasts also marked the first time a family suffered the loss of a loved one in full view of a television audience. The 27 hours of extended live coverage from the scene made celebrities out of first responders and the sandhogs who risked their lives in the attempt to save a little girl. It showed consumers that TV was more than just a gadget: live television could transmit a compelling story into their homes as it unfolded.

Covering Crime, 1951: The investigation into the murder of eight-year-old Patty Jean Hull, kidnapped from a movie theater by a known sex offender, raised ethical questions about sensational crime coverage. While KTLA hesitated to bring the lurid details into viewers living rooms, KTTV offered a more aggressive approach. The extended live coverage foreshadowed the development of crime-centered local newscasts and the motto, If it bleeds, it leads.

The Cold War Hits Home, 1952: KTLAs Klaus Landsberg took on the challenge of televising an atomic bomb detonation, risking everything to overcome technical and logistical obstacles. One local station brought live pictures of the Cold War into homes across America when the networks insisted it was impossible.

Pictures From the Air, 1958: The top-secret project that launched the worlds first TV news helicopter, capable of transmitting live pictures from the air. Aerial coverage gave KTLA an advantage over its competitors in reporting the Bel Air fire and the Baldwin Hills dam collapse. No other TV station in America would match KTLAs technological feat until 1974, when the Telecopter was sold to a rival station in Los Angeles.

The Rise of the Celebrity Anchorman, 1970s: Two newscasters in Los Angeles, George Putnam and Jerry Dunphy, were the role models for the iconic character of Ted Baxter on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Local TV news presenters evolved into highly paid celebrities, with appearance and personality often valued over journalistic ability.

You, the reader, are invited to journey back in time to meet the fascinating heroes and rogues who invented live and local TV news in Los Angeles.

Everyone's Child