Thank you for sharing this very early newscast. The historic time frame here was just three months after Mao-Tse Tung had declared that the Communists controlled Mainland China. It was just six months after the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic bomb, far sooner than most Americans could have conceptualized. Both of these events were pretty shocking. Yet this was over five months before the Soviet/Chinese backed invasion of South Korea by North Korea, hence the apparent indifference of the State Department to Formosa (Taiwan) requests for military assistance. Very interesting!
As seen weeknights at 7:30pm(et). At the time, Oldsmobile sponsored Edwards' newscast on alternate evenings. This was one of those "sustaining" editions.
US television was miles ahead with TV news than in Britain - in 1950 there was no British television news program as such, just a Television Newsreel which was non topical. Radio was where the British got their news each day in 1952. Eventually a British TV news program launched in 1954, but in vision newscasters wasn't seen until 1955
Edwards had begun with CBS-TV in 1946 when there was no network and essentially no audience. No other radio newsman wanted the job. When CBS closed the studio during 1947 to do only remote broadcasts, Edwards was stuck doing "radio on tv," as he could no longer be seen.
I doubt very many kinescope recordings of network TV newscasts prior to the fall of 1951 still exist, probably because they were only seen in East Coast and Midwestern cities connected to network lines. I don't think kinescopes of network newscasts were made for stations not connected to network lines, with those films flown for telecast the next day. I suspect a lot more kinescopes exist of network newscasts after the fall of 1951, as network lines had reached the West Coast. Many live network programs, both news and entertainment, would be recorded in this manner for playback to California three hours later.
