The TV Room

Hearst, Pulitzer, Jacksonian Democracy, the Fourth Estate. New York City in the 1890s. Tabloid media concentrates its power, and becomes unchecked and unbalanced.

In the Internet Age, actual paper and ink newspapers have gone the way of the dinosaur. But at the turn of the last century, newspapers were as exciting and central to daily life as the internet is now. The Gilded Age was a time of rapid modernization, but also of endemic corruption with massive amounts of wealth and power concentrated in just a few hands. Industrialists and financiers of the time were more powerful than the President. Against this backdrop, a newspaper publisher named...

A Quick Note About Upcoming TV Room Episodes

In 1800, nothing went faster than a sailing ship or a team of horses, not even communiques. Electronics did not exist and machines were unknown. By 1900, you could talk by phone to different cities, take a subway to go see a movie, and drive a car. Millions of people were on the move, leaving the old world behind and going to where the jobs were, in factories with machines that ran around the clock. Their grandparents lived and died in a world that hadn't changed much since Medieval times,...

Did the upset election of 2016 mark the death knell of journalism? From telegraph to television, newspapers to newscasters, telegraph cables to cable news, how Morse Code was the binary code that started the first Information Age, and why cable TV news might be the end.

1. The Age of Television

In this episode of the TV Room podcast, with the shadow of the 2016 Presidential election looming large, we ask and attempt to answer: What's up with the Electoral College System anyway, and why do we still use it? When did "these United States" become "the United States"? How is this nation different from other nations?