When A Platform Becomes A Bridge
Regularly pulling in excess of 40 million viewers, Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show audience is unthinkable today. Jimmy Fallon’s current audience pulls in just over 1 million (Lowman, 2014). But for as large as Carson’s audience was, it was also one of the most intimate. For many Americans in 1968, it was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep (Krieger, 2023a). Watching in bed as they drifted off to the soothing magnetism of Carson’s Nebraskan charm.
Carson had a strong sense of the American mosaic in 1968, but was still beholden to the commercial restraint of sponsors and advertisers (Walsh, 2017). He knew the tensions in society over the intensifying Vietnam War abroad and the deepening racial violence and economic tensions at home. And he understood that his pulpit could act as a powerful bridge between opponents. In February 1968 Carson turned over hosting duties for a week to Harry Belafonte, who had already achieved success through being able to span racial difference (Krieger, 2023b). As Norman Lear describes, “he was an ambassador in both directions—to his own people and to the Caucasian community. It is rare to this day.” (Walsh, 2017). In doing so, Carson provided the platform for Belafonte’s social activism to reach the largest audience in the country.
Over the course of the week, Belafonte invited some of the most influential people of their time. Martin Luther King Jr, Robert F. Kennedy, Paul Newman, Aretha Franklin, Bill Cosby and many others who might otherwise have been unfamiliar to a white audience (Richen, 2020). Belafonte was able to leverage Carson’s platform to bring not just the outside inside, but to reflect America as it truly was, inclusive of its problems. And in doing so echoed what was happening with television itself as it moved from black and white to color. It resonated deeply with Carson’s audience. “All of these people came with a social point of view,” Belafonte recalled. “That was my goal: to articulate a particular point of view. We were at the peak of social and political struggle in the country. America was awakened. The viewership was astounding” (Walsh, 2017). It humanized inhuman issues by leveraging the trust Carson had placed in Belafonte, and the trust Belafonte had earned himself.
Recording on magnetic tape wasn’t anything new, and neither was time-shifting. The Tonight Show continues to be recorded at 5pm and airs over 6 hours later, still under the illusion of live. Yet in 1968 magnetic tape was expensive, and through 1971 NBC had the common practice of using the same tapes to record over old shows in order to film new episodes (Walsh, 2017). The practice of keeping episodes was new, even if the process of recording and airing them was not.
The only interviews which remain from Belafonte’s Tonight Show, either by coincidence or the intervention of persons unknown, are his talks with Kennedy and King (Richen, 2020). As McDonough describes, “At a time when YouTube offers clips of just about anything, it's almost inconceivable that a major network would not save, or try to repackage … its Carson material” (McDonough, 2020). What happens to Belafonte’s Tonight Show is mirrored by the technological process of the day. It passes into history, and without material preservation, also passes into unrecorded memory. Over time the magnetic tape loses its ability to remember, as do we.
Yet what NBC didn’t record was still able to be recovered by home recording enthusiasts. These bootleg recordings became cultural artifacts in rescuing the overwritten. They would save the words of those who sought to draw attention to society’s overwritten. The operational process of recording over the magnetic tape reflects the often violent suppression of issues of social justice and race happening in America. Magnetic tape is itself a metaphor for 1968.
Home recording as a form of activism to protect the truth reaches its crescendo in the archival projects of Marion Stokes, who recorded news broadcasts across multiple cable networks, all day, for decades. At the time of her death, she had amassed over seventy thousand tapes, which are now slowly becoming digitized by the Internet Archive Project (Wolf, 2019). Stokes was consumed by the idea of how a raw story gets filtered by the predilections of the people who produce it, and what gets lost as a mediated story evolves (Kessler, 2013). She held deep concerns over how public perception was being molded by television, and how media reflects society back upon itself, much as Belafonte had done in 1968. Her archival activism became a bridge to understand her present inside our own.
Stokes paid particular attention to large news events. Motivated by 1979’s Iranian Hostage Crisis, ABC began airing Nightline in direct competition with The Tonight Show at 11.30, and began to siphon off Carson’s audience into the pervasive and persuasive real-world human drama of international politics (Wolf, 2019). A year later CNN would launch the now omnipresent 24-hour news cycle. What happens to television at 11.30 then acts as a cultural locus around which television itself begins to orient. And with cheap magnetic tape now also in the hands of the audience, everything gets remembered.
But in that remembrance comes deeply uncomfortable truth as America holds a more powerfully mediated mirror up to itself. We see police brutality, mass murder, terrible accidents and enormous suffering. Television doesn’t just reflect who we are, it also begins to catalyze response. Riots erupt over nightly footage of police beatings. We watch live as horrific acts of terrorism unfold in lower Manhattan. And the networks fragment and fill their schedules with increasingly partisan politics.
We orient our use of television around our existing systems of belief, and look for those outlets which reinforce our own cultural values (Krieger, 2023a). We are what we watch. And if Carson and Belafonte sought to unite, the fragmented technology of the modern news cycle often divides. King believed that the all-seeing eye of television would make racism harder to maintain (Wolf, 2019). He was wrong. It games attention, and is good for business. Ethical issues are everywhere. Of the brutal 2016 presidential campaign, CBS head Les Moonves described “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS” (Bond, 2016).
Thomas Levin argues that archives create futures. That we only know afterwards what is important to have collected (Wolf, 2019). What remains of Belafonte’s Tonight Show isn’t just a cultural artifact of its time. It’s a spark which ignites the cultural fire of the 24-hour news cycle. It brought the outside in, shone light on the overwritten, and held a still deeply uncomfortable mirror up to America. A mirror which over time became a highly mediated, fragmented, polarized pulpit through which even truth could be disputed. And when the truth itself becomes malleable, television’s no longer building bridges, it’s building walls.
References:
Bond, P. (2016). Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: “It May Not Be Good for America, but It’s Damn Good for CBS”. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved from: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/leslie-moonves-donald-trump-may-871464/.
Kessler, S. (2013). The Incredible Story Of Marion Stokes, Who Single-Handedly Taped 35 Years Of TV News. Fast Company. Retrieved from: https://www.fastcompany.com/3022022/the-incredible-story-of-marion-stokes-who-single-handedly-taped-35-years-of-tv-news.
Krieger, M. (2023a). Week 4 Lecture 4: Case Study - Technology and Social Change: Sesame Street and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (10:56). The University of Pennsylvania. [Digital Audio File]. Retrieved from https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1723764/pages/week-4-lecture-4-case-study-technology-and-social-change-sesame-street-and-the-tonight-show-with-johnny-carson-10-56?module_item_id=27053033.
Krieger, M. (2023b). Week 4 Lecture 3: Television and Social Change: Context for the 1960s (8:00). The University of Pennsylvania. [Digital Audio File]. Retrieved from https://canvas.upenn.edu/courses/1723764/pages/week-4-lecture-3-television-and-social-change-context-for-the-1960s-8-00?module_item_id=27053032.
Lowman, R. (2014). Jimmy Fallon takes ‘The Tonight Show’ reins from Leno, Seth Meyers to make debut. Los Angeles Daily News. Retrieved from https://www.dailynews.com/2014/02/14/jimmy-fallon-takes-the-tonight-show-reins-from-leno-seth-meyers-to-make-debut/.
McDonough, K. (2020). A week of 'The Tonight Show' almost lost to history. Times Herald-Record Online. Retrieved from: https://www.recordonline.com/story/entertainment/2020/09/16/tv-guy-harry-belafonte-hosts/5804813002/.
Richen, Y. (2020). The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte hosts the Tonight Show. PeacockTV. [Digital Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.peacocktv.com/watch-online/movies/documentary/the-sit-in-harry-belafonte-hosts-the-tonight-show/0f4b9046-408f-33ac-a1ce-dd2099ee4a35.
Walsh, J. (2017). 49 Years Ago, Harry Belafonte Hosted the Tonight Show—and It Was Amazing. TheNation.com. Retrieved from: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/49-years-ago-harry-belafonte-hosted-the-tonight-show-and-it-was-amazing/.
Wolf, M. (2019). Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. Documentary Film. Kino Lorber. Retrieved from: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.56b836b0-44aa-02ee-27f3-255c58fc2e60?ref_=imdbref_tt_wbr_ovf__pvt_aiv&tag=imdbtag_tt_wbr_ovf__pvt_aiv-20.
Disclosure:
I am currently an employee of NBC Universal, the network which originally produced Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and continues to air The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. In my research for this project I have held numerous off-the-record internal discussions with NBC employees and archivists which have informed and contributed to my work.
Generative Ai Statement:
I have not used any generative artificial intelligence platforms in the execution of this project. Neither my argument nor its content requires its use, and any visualization I have used has been created with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and Apple Keynote.
