A Newscast for the Masses: The History of Detroit Television News by Tim Kiska (review)

Book Reviews 139 Tim Kiska. A Newscast for the Masses: The History of Detroit Television News. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. Pp. 198. Appendix. Epilogue. Illustrations. Notes. Paper, $24.95. Tim Kiska introduces a wonderful bit of irony in the epilogue of A Newscast for the Masses: The History of Detroit Television News. Kiska quotes that great news god of television’s golden age, Edward R. Murrow, bemoaning the impact of the profit motive on broadcast news: “I would like television to produce some itching pills, rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers” (p. 145). The irony is that in citing the need to make the body politic healthy by making it itch, Murrow consciously references Heywood Broun, who had held a place similar to Murrow’s in the pantheon of newspaper journalism a generation earlier. Newspapers, as Kiska points out, were intimately involved in the development of television—in Detroit and elsewhere—and today appear to be on the brink of extinction because of the impact of television and other electronic media. The fact that Morrow’s complaint is nearly a half-century old illustrates that the transformation of television journalism into infotainment is not news. But Kiska’s case study of the Detroit television market does a solid job of demonstrating how that transformation occurred in one city and how Detroit’s experience fit into the broader national trend. Newscast provides an excellent overview of four decades of Detroit television journalism, based in significant part on extensive interviews Kiska conducted with local news anchors, reporters, and station executives. Kiska had exceptional knowledge of the topic and access to his sources because of his thirty-two-year career as a reporter and television columnist at the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. The book’s opening chapter explores local television’s roots in the radio industry, and a twenty-eight-page appendix offers extensive supporting statistical information beginning in the early 1950s. Nostalgia enthusiasts will enjoy the attention Kiska gives to the personalities of the city’s television news business. Popular, but largely forgotten, broadcasters like Carl Cederberg, Ven Marshall, and Dick Westercamp show up, along with more recent or more influential figures like Jac Le Goff, Bill Bonds, and Mort Crim, as well as sportscasters Dave Diles and Al Ackerman. But Kiska’s main focus is the overarching business story, and that account is both the book’s strength and its weakness. As a case study of the four-decade trend in Detroit television journalism, it is a solid 140 Michigan Historical Review contribution to local history. As an examination of the people who ran that industry—and were the public faces of those broadcasts consumed by the masses—it is disappointingly brief, tantalizing readers but not satisfying them. For example, Kiska discusses the late appearance and struggles of African Americans—such as Jerry Blocker, Bob Bennett, Doris Biscoe, Ben Frazier, and Emery King—as television news reporters and anchors, but the topic warrants a more thorough examination than the scope of his study permits. Similarly, Kiska describes WWJ-TV’s 1973 experiment with Betty Carrier as an anchor, and mentions other women journalists, such as Jennifer Moore, Carmen Harlan, and Biscoe, but his discussion of their role is not extensive. But what Newscast is not should not detract from what it is. There is more to be written about Detroit television news, but Kiska’s book is a solid and useful beginning. Stephen A. Jones Central Michigan University Brian Ladd. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. 227. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $22.50. “The abhorrence of cars is inseparable from their appeal” (p. 177). This duality inherent within the automobile is the focus of Brian Ladd’s Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. Whether one sees in the car the dream of speed or the reality of gridlock, the promise of individual mobility or societal dislocation and environmental degradation, depends on one’s point of view. Ladd’s study examines both individuals’ and societies’ shifting perceptions of the automobile; to accomplish this he follows the discourse between automobile boosters and critics during the twentieth...