1968 - Mark Kurlansky [25]
After Albany, television became an integral part of every campaign strategy. Within King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Andrew Young served as the chief adviser on media, or at least on white-controlled media. He understood that to get on television every day, they had to provide daily messages that were short and dramatic, what are now called sound bites, and that these had to be accompanied by what television called “a good visual.” Young emphasized and King quickly grasped that the daily Martin Luther King statement should be no more than sixty seconds. Many SNCC activists thought King had gone too far, that he and his organization overused media. They believed that he was creating short-term news events, whereas they wanted to work more within southern society to create fundamental changes—a slow, off-camera process.
But the reality was that by 1968, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the antiwar movement, even Congress and conventional politics had become deeply involved with the question of how to get a television cameraman, in the words of then CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, “to push the button.”
Two innovations in television technology completely changed broadcast news—videotape and direct satellite transmission. Both were developed in the 1960s, and though neither one came into full use until the 1970s, by 1968 they had already begun to change the way broadcast journalists thought. Videotape is inexpensive, can be reused, and does not have to be processed before broadcasting. In 1968 most television news was still shooting sixteen-millimeter black-and-white film, usually from cameras mounted on tripods, though there were also handheld cameras. Because the film was expensive and time-consuming to process, it could not be shot indiscriminately. The cameraman would set up and then wait for a signal from the correspondent. When the correspondent judged that the scene was becoming interesting—sometimes the cameraman would make the decision himself—he would give a signal, and the cameraman would push the button and start filming. “You could shoot ten minutes to get one minute,” said Schorr, “but you couldn’t shoot two hours.”
What became apparent to Schorr was that it was “a matter of decibels. . . . As soon as somebody raised his voice and said, ‘But how can you sit there and say so and so’—I would press the button, because television likes drama, television likes conflict, and anything that indicates conflict was a candidate for something that might get on the air—on the Cronkite show that evening, which was what we were all trying to do.”
The presence of cameras started to have a noticeable impact on civility in debates. Schorr recalled in covering the Senate, “They frequently raised their voice for no reason at all, just because they knew that it would get our attention by doing that.” But it was not only politicians in chambers that turned strident to get the button pushed. Abbie Hoffman understood how this worked, Stokely Carmichael understood it, and so did Martin Luther King. In 1968, after a decade of working with news media, King realized that he was losing the television competition. He complained to Schorr that television was encouraging black leaders to say the most violent and inflammatory things and had very little interest in his nonviolence. “When Negroes are incited to violence, will you think of your responsibility in helping to produce it?” King asked Schorr.
“Did I go on seeking menacing sound bites as my passport to the evening news?” Schorr asked himself in a moment of soul-searching. “I’m afraid I did.”
The other invention that was changing television was live satellite transmission. The first transmission from a satellite was the tape-recorded