Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Chapter 9
Lecture Builders
NOTES: ROOTS MINI SERIES―ERIK BARNOUW: In 1977, ABC-TV created a new form of television for an
American audience and demonstrated the power of television to shape a nations agenda for discussion.
On eight consecutive nights, January 23 through 30, the miniseries Roots aired. It told the story of
African-American writer Alex Haley’s family, starting with Kunte Kinte, an African taken into slavery,
through the years the family spent in the United States, up to the Emancipation.
Each night that the show aired, it gained in audience, and the final episode of the series had the highest
ratings of any program up until that time. This was followed by Holocaust on NBC, which dealt with a
single Jewish family experiencing Hitler’s Final Solution. Television historian Erik Barnouw, in his book
Tube of Plenty, says that the two programs changed the landscape of television because they
demonstrated that there could be a market for serious, disturbing programs shown over an extended
period of time.
They also came at a pivotal time for television history, when network television was beginning a long
decline in audience size and profitability as it moved into the cable era, where there would rarely be a
single mass audience, but rather a disconnected series of separate audiences.
VIDEO HINT: Showing a clip or two from the Best of the Ernie Kovacs series can serve as an illustration of
how comedy adapted to the new medium in the 1950s. I typically use the oscilloscope gags, the “Gorilla
Swan Lake,” or the “Nairobi Trio.”
You find several examples of Ernie Kovacs’s work and the influence he has had at
http://ralphehanson.com/blog/archive_kovacs.html
Philo T. Farnsworth
Learn more about Philo T. Farnsworth and his invention of television with this interview with his
biographer, Daniel Stashower:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?170335-1/boy-genius-mogul
NOTES: Another good interview from C-SPAN’s Booknotes program. The streaming content and
transcripts make for great materials to use in Web-based courses. You can get high quality streaming of
the programs from the C-SPAN video site and transcripts with background on the author and the book at
C-SPAN’s Booknotes page.
• http://booknotes.org/
• http://www.c-spanvideo.org/
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Lucy
Following my discussion of Lucile Ball and Desi Arnaz, I generally show the second half of the I
Love Lucy episode “Changing Jobs.” This demonstrates the pair’s incredible gift for comedy along with
illustrating the increased production values that resulted from shooting the series on film rather than
airing it live.
Walter Cronkite
Hear former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite talk about how network television developed in this C-
SPAN Booknotes interview.
• https://www.c-span.org/video/?81241-1/reporters-life
NOTES: The name of Walter Cronkite may not ring any bells for your students, most of whom were born
after he left the anchor desk at CBS. One of the best uses for this link, and for Cronkite’s book A
Reporter’s Life is to bring to life the early days of television news. In the years prior to his death in 2009,
Cronkite was writing a newspaper column and producing historical pieces for NPR. The most relevant of
these is one from 2003 about the skyjackings of September 1970 that were the first use of airplane
hijackings as a tool of terrorism.
• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1426387