This post, is dedicated to New York news legend, Ernie Anastos: who passed away on the 12th of March, at the age of 82.
America: your survey is ready.
History beckons for a series that has made kept a track record of Australian television news history for half a decade. Because it’s history, we are bound to record.
Content Survey Live, has had it’s share of midnight rides, and a record that would put Paul Revere himself to the test. The signals that kicked off the ride by Paul Revere at the start of the Revolutionary War 251 years ago were simple. One if by land, two if by sea, lanterns at top of Boston’s Old North Church, to start the fateful ride.
Today, it’s 0s and 1’s down a underwater fibre cable or up in a satellite, and they show up on the other side of the world at the same time, perhaps faster than a single movement of Revere’s horse so long ago.
But the most important thing such a series like ours, has done and will do for as long as we do so, is to honour the right of a free press: something that Thomas Jefferson implored for, most famously in a letter to John Jay in January, 1786.
“It is really to be lamented that after a public servant has passed a life in important and faithful services, after having given the most plenary satisfaction in every station, it should yet be in the power of every individual to disturb his quiet, by arraigning him in a gazette and by obliging him to act as if he needed a defence, an obligation imposed on him by unthinking minds which never give themselves the trouble of seeking a reflection unless it be presented to them. However it is a part of the price we pay for our liberty, which cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”
Excerpt from “Thomas Jefferson to John Jay, 25 January 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-09-02-0190. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9, 1 November 1785 – 22 June 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, p. 215.]
America, this year marked 240 years since that letter was written… with little more than a glance: the focus being on July 4: and a nation’s 250th birthday.
For the next month or so, we will be capturing the spirit of America, through a content survey journey wending in and out of sixteen different cities, as we lead into that milestone on July the 4th, and perhaps capture the mood at these CBS stations about to lose their most important thing they have: their late news leadout.
America: your survey is ready. And we are about to kick it off real big. Monday Night in the Big Apple. Because, if we are going to make it there… we’ll make it anywhere.
It’s up to you, New York, New York.
