That Darn List! The Top 10 TV News Events

Wow, you're good. I can't think of a single thing to add or take off. Then again I was only alive for 4 items on the list and only recall 2. I was sitting in my 5th grade class when they read the verdict in the OJ Simpson Trial, my teacher wanted us to watch it because she said it was important.

I'm certainly not the most newsworthy hound, but the one event as a child that sticks in my mind with dramatic coverage was MLK's death - the TV images are etched in my mind.

Playing the game fair - which would I take off? I take off either 1954 or 1960 because I'm not old enough to have recollection of the TV impact...

To add:
Coverage of the Vietnam war: For the first time a war with all its brutality was brought into American living rooms, helping to turn Americans against the war. When Walter Cronkite criticized the war on national TV it wasn’t just a turning point in the public perception of the war, and it was a turning point in the history of journalism.

Nixon’s Checker’s speech: It was the first real example of a politician fully utilizing the potential of Television as a communication tool. This speech saved his political career, and laid the groundwork for any number of presidential speeches and apologies on television.

To delete:
The McCarthy Hearings: The very fact that the hearings were on TV is not what gave these hearings their cultural significance. If you wanted to single out Murrow’s report criticizing the hearings, then maybe I’d have a harder time cutting it, but it doesn’t seem to me that the coverage of the hearing’s themselves really added anything truly new.

Nixon-Frost Interview: The news event had happened, any really great impact culturally, or politically had happened, and I don’t believe that anything truly new was added to medium. While it did make for great drama and theater (see the play based on these interviews), I don’t believe that it was anything truly groundbreaking.

I would lose Rodney King (if you want racial TV, the OJ hoopla gave it in spades) and add the 2000 Presidential election. Whether or not you like the outcome, the national civic lesson, drama, and impact on the next several years cannot be disputed.

Replace Rodney King with Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" and OJ with Katrina coverage.

O come on guys, Rodney King was groudbreaking, it was the first time that people generated content was able to shift the national debate. It was the first in what would prove to be a long line of reporting that focus on video provided not by a member of the mainstream media, but by the general public.

The Challenger explosion was probably the first horrible tragedy broadcast on live TV. And particularly traumatic to those of us watching in our third-grade classrooms that morning! (Remove the hostage crisis, it's not a singular event.)

James, I'm amused you called the cable-news "crawl" a "zipper", if that's what you're referring to. I don't think they "improvised" it on 9/11, because there was always a crawl on Headline News, not to mention the ESPN family (and probably some other cable newscasts - I didn't become fascinated with cable news until 9/11). But it definitely sent the cablers into all-crawl, all-the-time mode, which continues to this day, with scattered exceptions like Olbermann's show.

@Dan

"Crawl" = "zipper," yes. I certainly didn't mean they invented it oon 9/11, but it was not a 24//7 feature of Fox, CNN (not HN) and MSNBC until that morning. They threw it up first -- I was writing on this that morning, so I still have my notes -- as a way of getting out all the news and (sometimes erroneous reports); Fox was first by a few minutes and the others followed. Then it just kind of stuck. And afterward, of course, it became much more part of the vocabulary of TV.

But yes, of course, business news channels had all kinds of info crawls as well too before then.

I'd toss the Nixon-Frost interviews. It was fascinating for political/history junkies (and I was one, in college at the time, and watched all of them), but in retrospect I suspect they had as much influence as the Barbara Walters-Michael Jackson interview.

I'd add the news coverage when Reagan got shot. Not only was it the first time a President had been wounded by a would-be assassin since JFK (and the only one ever to survive, BTW), but TV rolled out the story in real time, bit by bit, with some backstage drama (Frank Reynolds needing to be steadied by Ted Koppel)and misinformation (Reagan was much worse than initially believed). Plus, they preempted (for a day) the Oscars. It's got my vote, anyway.

The Challenger explosion certainly came to my mind, also, especially given the fact that Krista Mcauliffe's students were watching the events unfold, live.

Another one that comes to mind is the rescue of Jessica McClure from that well in Texas in 1986.

The first five entries in your list occurred before or during the year of my birth, so I don't feel "qualified" to suggest removing any of them.