Let’s remember when KING-5 aired the Northwest’s first local news broadcast, on this day in 1951 (September 10)
Local news in Seattle is a scourge, but this isn’t about Eric Johnson. It wasn’t always that way, and there was some altruism behind the creation of local news.
Frank Chesley of HistoryLink says:
At 6:45 p.m., on September 10, 1951, Charles H. Herring Jr. (1922–2006), stood before KING-TV’s studio camera to launch television news in the Pacific Northwest. The Seattle station had been on the air for only two years. Along with other new stations throughout the country, KING-TV was inventing television as it went along and was already among the leaders of the fledgling industry.
Dorothy Bullitt (1892–1989), a newcomer to broadcasting, had bought the station in 1949 and she felt “a strong obligation to public service, using her stations to serve the community — her ‘home town.’” The King Broadcasting Company’s aggressive news and public-service commitment set a standard not only for the Pacific Northwest, but for national TV broadcasting as well.
There were only a few thousand television sets in KING-TV’s signal area in 1951, and they faced a circle of viewers mesmerized by the grainy, black-and-white images flickering on the eight-inch screen. Television’s first network anchorman, CBS’s Douglas Edwards (1917–1990), had been on the air since 1948, followed in 1949 by John Cameron Swayze (1906–1995) on NBC. CBS and NBC were in a race to develop color television. The first transcontinental television broadcast had occurred only a few days earlier, on September 4, from the historic Japanese peace treaty conference in San Francisco, which officially ended World War II.
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