It’s that special day of summer when Fall abruptly arrives at the doorstep of UC Berkeley. Kate and Allie have stepped out of the line and taken refuge. Kate’s right foot has been stripped of its sandal, and Allie is applying some kind of ointment before bandaging it up like a battle-tested field nurse. The sisterhood of Kate and Allie has already endured the first tribulation of the new year, and classes haven’t even started yet.
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Hearst, Pulitzer, Jacksonian Democracy, the Fourth Estate. New York City in the 1890s. Tabloid media concentrates its power, and becomes unchecked and unbalanced.
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Media wars are nothing new. In the 1880s modern journalism began under the auspices of Joseph Pulitzer. By the 1890s, “ratings wars” between Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst pushed newspaper publishers into increasingly reckless territory. This is where our modern media culture begins. Listen in on this episode of the TV Room as we revisit the heyday of Pulitzer’s New York media empire, when he was able to use his newspapers to confront the excesses of the Gilded Age and help usher in the reforms of the Progressive Era that followed. We then set the table for Pulitzer’s feud with William Randolph Hearst, which would expose the dark side of the power of the press.
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In 1800, nothing went faster than a sailing ship or a team of horses, not even communiques. Electronics did not exist and machines were unknown. By 1900, you could talk by phone to different cities, take a subway to go see a movie, and drive a car. Millions of people were on the move, leaving the old world behind and going to where the jobs were, in factories with machines that ran around the clock.
Their grandparents lived and died in a world that hadn’t changed much since Medieval times, and their grandchildren would grow up with rock n roll and television. The modern age begins with them, the people of the Nineteenth Century. They are the subject of this episode of the TV Room.
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Did the upset election of 2016 mark the death knell of journalism? From telegraph to television, newspapers to newscasters, telegraph cables to cable news, how Morse Code was the binary code that started the first Information Age, and why cable TV news might be the end.
January 2016. Two travelers prowl the wet surface streets of San Francisco like soldier ants working a freshly scrubbed countertop, looking for the greasy crumb trails that they knew were once there, and are now gone. That’s how the City…
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In this episode of the TV Room podcast, with the shadow of the 2016 Presidential election looming large, we ask and attempt to answer:
What’s up with the Electoral College System anyway, and why do we still use it?
When did “these United States” become “the United States”?
How is this nation different from other nations?
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On this episode of the TV ROOM PODCAST: Donald Trump takes the White House…What started with JFK looking more presidential during a televised debate with Richard Nixon in 1960 has led 56 years later to a TV personality shattering the glass screen to become Commander-in-Chief. Is this the moment everybody who described television as a ‘vast wasteland’ was afraid of?