Before the Bloggers: The Upstart News Technology of Television at the 1948 Political Conventions

Abstract

At the 2004 political conventions, Web loggers received press credentials for the first time in history. Bloggers confidently wrote about putting new life into the conventions, which they said had been ruined by politicians and television. But more than 50 years earlier, television was the exciting new technology of the political conventions.

The 1948 conventions became television's political coming-out party, launching the medium as a serious journalistic platform. Through oral history interviews and other historical sources, an important confluence of technology, politics, and journalism emerges amid the backroom deals, balloons, speeches, posturing, and demonstrations inside the Philadelphia Convention Hall during those wilting summer months in Philadelphia in 1948. Politicians initially pushed for television coverage because of the potential audience, but soon realized the live camera would forever change the event. That spring, AT&T opened up the first commercial coaxial cable video system, creating a television network of 17 stations in 9 cities that could show the events live, allowing more than a million people to watch the political process simultaneously. Just as important, the conventions forced radio and print journalists who had ignored or ridiculed television to confront the medium and appear live on camera.