 This is the SF Productions podcast network. I think we have some results coming in from the West. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Indy. And I'm Mark, you can check out our audio podcast, how I get my way through your comics on iTunes, or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. As we tape this, we are scant days from the US election. So I don't stop the video. Don't worry, we're not gonna talk about politics. Thank goodness. Just the history of how television covers them. You know, when I married Mark, I had no idea we'd be glued to the TV set for election night. I always enjoy watching them, not so much for the results, but the showmanship and the graphics and the tech that the networks throw at us. It's not like, hey, look who's winning the race. It's like, hey, look at this cool thing they have now. It's the news division's version of the Super Bowl, really. Yes. Now, to begin, you have to go all the way back to 1939. Oh, I thought you were gonna say 1776, okay. When an experimental NBC televised a speech by FDR at the World's Fair, virtually no one but NBC engineers and executives actually saw it. And that was the first time a president was on the air, right? And it was one of the first ever network broadcasts. Skipping ahead to 1948, because US television was shut down during World War II. I did not know that. Yeah, because they needed all the tech and the technicians for radar and... Oh, how interesting. Yeah, yeah, there was no US television during World War II. Wow. All four US TV networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Dumont. Not Fox. Covered the conventions to a still miniscule audience. Both parties agreed to meet in the same city, Philadelphia, mostly to ensure they would get TV coverage because the industry was mostly on the east coast at the time and the camera setup was so hard to do. They're like, look, you got to both go to the same place. We're not setting this up twice. Early TV required massive lighting and the hall was not air conditioned. The result was a lot of sweaty conventioneers. You wouldn't want to be in that room. NBC was the sole network to have actual live election night coverage that year. And back then the basic structure of TV was that each program had a single sponsor and that extended to news. So the Life NBC coverage, as in Life Magazine, you can find it all, a lot of this on YouTube, shows three co-hosts huddled around a tiny desk, including John Cameron Swayze. Now people our age might remember his Timex ads, but he was a newsman back then. Tally's were kept on a chalkboard as they came in. What? What? Yeah. Much of the coverage was audio only with the host listening in on video because they couldn't get a signal from these various locations. And you also got a lot of wild audio with technicians, writers, and reporters asking questions that should never been on the air. Like, hey, do you want me to bring that script to you? And it's on the air. Of course, this was also the night of the infamous Dewey Beats Truman newspaper. So did they get any predictions or were they making any predictions? They were barely keeping the thing together. Okay. But moving on to 1952 and now broadcasting coast to coast, CBS joined in live election night coverage introducing something most Americans had never actually seen, a computer. An early Univac tabulated and predicted election results. It wasn't camera friendly, so they made a mockup of a computer console on camera while the actual computer was 100 miles away. Did they pretend it was a real computer or? Oh yeah, they were trying. Oh yeah, here I am. Da-dee-dee-dee. NBC countered with the Monrobot computer, which was another company at the time. Both predicted early, both the computers predicted early that Eisenhower would win, but the networks didn't believe them at first. Of course, the whole thing was a gimmick. Yes. And you can see echoes of this if you watch the virtual reality gimmick this election night. Chalkboards were replaced with physical scoreboards like old time baseball scorecards. You know, like hanging numbers on them. That's just freaky. Skipping to 1960, we saw the first presidential debate decided by TV with a pasty sweaty Richard Nixon losing to Hale and Hardy JFK. Now, radio audiences who had not seen it, but heard it, thought Nixon should have won the debate, but the ones on TV were like, oh no, JFK clearly won. And this is when we started electing pretty presidents instead of smart presidents. Yep. Now, Huntley-Brinkley teams started their long NBC News election night run that year. They were surrounded by a plethora of physical tote boards merrily clicking away as results came in. This was more like a digital clock. Yeah, the old-time digital clock that flipped rather than the hanging the numbers one. And I guess they had some time to kill. So the YouTube footage includes an exhaustive explanation from Chet Huntley of how their editorial process worked. The RCA 501 computer, yes, RCA at one point was a computer company, was considered to be a member of the election team and in fact predicted a Kennedy win. In that very close election, it wasn't actually awarded until the next morning. I love this because the California Board of Elections said, you guys can go home and get some sleep and keep counting the votes in the morning. Jumping to 1968, the Democratic convention that year was fraught with violent protests both inside and outside of the Chicago Hall. This was the famous, the whole world is watching event. Dan Reathers' career was made when he was manhandled on the convention floor while on the air and Walter Cronkite said, I think we got a bunch of thugs here. This was before a wireless setup, so rather, and the other floor reporters had extensive hookups. Yeah. 1968 election night on CBS began the use of a green screen behind the anchors to show the results coming in as well as early Chiron computer text graphics. Meanwhile, NBC started the use of computer data to drill down to individual voting districts. By 1972, all three networks, IABC, were now broadcast in color. And as they did so, a problem came up. Which colors should represent each party on the various maps and displays? Believe it or not, this was not standardized among the networks until 1996. NBC held out and they had their red and blue reversed until then. Wow. Yeah. The networks also starting adding actual music, which has become a major way to jazz up the coverage. They also moved away from trying to emulate a newsroom and threw a lot of red, white, and blue around. Of course, yes. CBS's set design reminded me of local TV news, lots of flocking on the walls. And by 1976, election night set design looked more like a game show. Little pods breaking up the Senate and the House and the governor's races. Computer graphics really kicked in by 1984, especially the stirring opening graphics. And we saw more drill downs, this time based on demographic groups. By 1992, we started seeing virtual graphics showing up on the anchor desk itself. So this was really funny. So the analysts doing the thing had three physical buttons you could see on the desk and she hit the button, this little thing would come up and it'd be like a little bar chart would come up. It's hilarious. Dan Rather started controlling the graphics himself via a touchscreen in 1996. There was like an overhead camera and they'd see him like, he'd hit things and it would show different things on the screen. Massive video screens covering the wall became a reality in 2000, just in time for that contentious race. And this was when the late Tim Russert went old school with a small whiteboard at NBC and that was his Florida, Florida, Florida thing. As if these gimmicks weren't enough, NBC in 2004 used window washers, so the machines take window washers up and down, on Rockefeller Plaza to display massive bar charts and use the ice rink for the national map. And so they would bring out like plastic, huge plastic things that look like each state and they'd lay them down as someone won a particular state. Were the people who put it out on ice games? I would hope. And then 2008 introduced virtual news arenas where analysts walked around a green screen room while graphics popped up around them. You know, I think that this is all great, because it gives people like Stephen Colbert and John Stewart when they're on their shows, great titles for their coverage. Yes, yes, this is when really by the 2000s it had become more, far more entertainment than it should night has really become these burst of activity every half hour as particular polls in a state close, followed by we have to fill up stuff until the next half hour. All right, because they can't like project a state until all the polls in that state have closed down. They used to do it sooner, but now they said that discouraged people from going out to vote if they hadn't closed already. So what's coming up next, Mark? What's this year gonna look like? Are you all excited? I'm guessing I'm predicting somebody's gonna have a virtual reality helmet on. Maybe we should make an election night bingo, and we can all play election night bingo together. And after you're done, you can check out our audio podcast, how I got my wife to read comics on iTunes or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Indy. And I'm Mark, thanks for watching.