Defining Vision: How Broadcasters Lured the Government into Inciting a Revolution in Television, Updated and Expanded - Softcover

Brinkley, Joel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156005972 ISBN 13: 9780156005975

Publisher: Dey Street Books, 1998

Synopsis

In this account of the political wrangling and technological breakthroughs that led to the creation of HDTV, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter “does for television...what Tracy Kidder did for computers” (Kirkus Reviews). Index.

About this title

Review

High-definition television (HDTV) will dramatically increase the quality of the display of traditional television as well as the much-anticipated set-top-box computer/television hybrids. And every major electronics company--and the U.S. and Japanese governments--is already imagining the unimaginably large financial rewards to be reaped by those lucky enough to have perfected the right gear at the right time: just about every piece of hardware in the television industry will be replaced or supplanted, from your television to the international broadcast infrastructure.

Brinkley's book introduces us to the major institutions and individuals from industry, government, and academia involved in this frantic race, and does an admirable job of untangling their labyrinthine relations. My only quibble with the book is that it should have included at least a few color photos of HDTV compared to regular TV. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the future of television technology--before it happens.

About the Author

Joel Brinkley is the Lorry I. Lokey visiting professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, a position he assumed in the fall of 2006 after a 23-year career with The New York Times. There he served as a reporter, editor and Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent. At Stanford, Brinkley writes a nationally syndicated op-ed column on foreign policy that appears in about two dozen newspapers each week, including the San Francisco Chronicle, and several other newspapers and Websites around the world. His areas of research include American foreign policy and the future of the nation’s newspaper industry. Brinkley is a native of Washington D.C., and a graduate of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press and over the following years worked for the Richmond (Va.) News Leader and the Louisville Courier Journal before joining the Times in 1983. At The New York Times, Brinkley served as Washington correspondent, White House correspondent and chief of the Times Bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He spent more than 10 years in editing positions including Projects Editor in Washington, Political Editor in New York, Investigations Editor in Washington following the September 11 attacks. He served as political writer in Baghdad during the fall of 2003. He also covered technology issues including the Microsoft anti-trust trial and was serving as foreign policy correspondent when he left the Times in June 2006. Over the last 26 years Brinkley has reported from 46 states and more than 50 foreign countries. He has won more than a dozen national reporting and writing awards. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and was twice a finalist for an investigative reporting Pulitzer in the following years. He was a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 2000 to 2006. Mr. Brinkley is the author of three books: The Circus Master's Mission, Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television , and U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Inside Story of the Landmark Case (with Steve Lohr). He has contributed to several other books, including the chapter on George W. Bush in The American Presidency, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0156005972
• ISBN 13: 9780156005975
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416