Television’s First News Man…Lowell Thomas
Television’s First News Man…Lowell Thomas
Although Lowell Thomas’s news programs were heard and seen on NBC radio and television, Thomas did not actually work for NBC…he worked for Sunoco, the sponsor of his shows.
Details on television’s first news program are few, and far between, but as best I can tell, Thomas hosted the first-ever television-news broadcast in 1939 on NBC’s W2XBS. I think this was a stand alone broadcast and not a simulcast, and perhaps was only done for one week as a trial run.
Television’s first ever regularly scheduled television news broadcast, which was a simulcast of his radio broadcast, began on February 21, 1940, on NBC Television. While W2XBS New York carried every TV/radio simulcast, it is not known if the two other stations capable of being fed programs by W2XBS, W2XB Schenectady and/or W3XE Philadelphia carried all or some of the simulcasts.
That February 21 telecast was on a Wednesday, and it is possible that the Thomas simulcasts were were only done once a week as midweek summary type shows for television. It is reported that his Wednesday NBC radio shows were summary style shows too.
It is not known when the ‘Sunoco News With Lowell Thomas’ television show ended. Some accounts say it was “brief”, while other sources report that it ended with the outbreak of WW II . Generally, we in the US think of that as December 7, 1941 with the Pearl Harbor bombing, but the war in Europe was already heating up. The start of the war is generally held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later.
I suspect that the show, with it’s limited viewership, ended in September so that Thomas could devote more time to his radio reporting duties. He is said not to have liked television as it kept him too tied down as he had to be in the studio every day. His radio show did a lot of traveling and he liked that.
In the Summer of 1940, Thomas anchored the first live telecast of a political convention, the 1940 Republican National Convention, which was fed from Philadelphia to W2XBS and on to W2XB. Reportedly, Thomas wasn’t in Philadelphia, but was instead anchoring the broadcast from a New York studio and merely identifying speakers who were about to or who had just addressed the convention.
It would take television till 1948 to present a regularly scheduled evening news show on the network level…that show was the ‘CBS Television News With Douglas Edwards’.
