Words took precedence. Roper thus transformed television news from seeing to hearing, and from showing to telling. When I arrived at NBC in 1950, America's TV networks were two years old. All other TV news, including local news, was primarily faces reading radio scripts, taken mostly from the wire services or cribbed from newspapers, with blurry still pictures because nobody had yet invented the technology for turning still photos into clear television signals. The networks with news programs had national and worldwide organizations of film cameramen, who tried to move from the languid regimen of the newsreels where most of them had been trained to the speed of daily journalism.
Film is physical and bulky.
It must be shipped, processed, cut apart and pasted together before it can be shown. So from anywhere abroad and nearly everywhere in the United States, it could not arrive as fast as a radio voice or a wire service teletype. Inthose days, we inside TV news assumed that anyone watching TV news already knew the news, from newspapers or the car radio. In our minds, film was the difference we had to offer. Seeing news happen gave it a different dimension and added enough to justify showing it a day or many days after it happened.