Abstract
“Local TV history wasn’t serious enough for the academic press,” Terry Anzur, broadcast news instructor heard after proposing a book on TV news history in Los Angeles. Despite the former TV anchor’s qualifications to write it, her quest for securing tenure at the University of Southern California’s prestigious Annenberg School with such a book seemed doomed. Anzur turned next to editors in the commercial book world, who suggested it would be better if she would just ghost-write her book for someone more well known (Anzur, p. 174). Not exactly what Anzur had in mind, so undeterred she wrote and published a 191-page history on her own, and it is well worth examining. Anzur is a media coach who has anchored television newscasts in media markets across the country, including New York, Los Angeles, and West Palm Beach, FL, and acted as a TV journalist in Hollywood movies and television shows. In her academic career, she taught broadcast journalism at USC and Pepperdine University.
Inventing TV News is a six-chapter chronicle of how two independent TV newsrooms, KTLA and KTTV, pioneered ways—innovated might be a better term—to cover breaking news in southern California showing a competitive zeal an entrepreneur in social media might envy. Realizing local television news was plying unchartered waters in LA, the six chapters of this book begin with the suspenseful retelling of the San Marino tragedy that unfolded live on TV screens after 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell deep down an uncapped water pipe in a field where she was heard crying out for her mother (Harrison, 2019). This story of an attempted rescue to save one girl’s life in 1949 was the moment when television news first realized bringing its viewers life-and-death stories to watch live on their TV sets at home was a worthy calling.
Media historians will note familiar names like Fiscus and Patty Jean Hull, the 8-year-old girl, taken hostage in a California movie theater by a sex offender, but it is Anzur’s through-the-lens retelling of these televised dramas that proves her book to be relevant to classes in journalism and mass communication history. Inventing TV News shows how significant early television reporting was not just because of the technical machinations of late-breaking coverage on television, but because it shows how the medium became the message. Whether it was the live coverage of an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud in the desert or aerial news footage of TV news helicopters first capturing the fight against California wildfires, local television news in was creating a global village in Southern California.
The accounts in this book are not only spectacular and literally death defying, but also humorous at times. Oversized egos on Los Angeles TV screens appear laughable as Anzur records how Ted Baxter the famous silver-haired golden throat of the Mary Tyler Moore situation comedy was drawn as a composite character from two TV news anchors in LA, George Putnam and Jerry Dunphy. Both of whom would easily rival the self-important personalities on video screens today.
What Anzur’s book accomplishes is more than a routine recitation of media history though. Inventing TV News is as compelling to read as local TV news was to watch from the 1950s to the 1980s, when living room viewers were just as engaged by anchors and reporters as social media influencers today are captivating young people on smartphones and handheld devices. Sure, the screen’s size has changed, but that need for social interaction feels much the same. TV news personalities engaged viewers with stories they could not resist, which is what Inventing TV News manages to do as well. Instructors of media history would do well to consider Anzur’s book for their class bibliographies.