Television
The 1979 Daytona 500 was the first 500-mile race to be broadcast in its entirety live on national television in the United States. Races were shown on television but as an example, the Indianapolis 500 was broadcast on tape delay that evening in this era, and usually in edited form. Most races aired during this period were only broadcast starting with the final quarter to half of the race, as was the procedure for ABC's IndyCar broadcasts on their Wide World of Sports program.
CBS signed a new contract with NASCAR to telecast the race. Ken Squier, David Hobbs and Chris Economaki were the booth announcers with Ned Jarrett, Mike Joy and Brock Yates in the pits for that race. The day was fortunate for CBS as a major snowstorm known as the Presidents Day Snowstorm of 1979 bogged down most of the Northeast and parts of the Midwestern United States, increasing the viewership of the event. The race introduced two new innovative uses of TV cameras: The "in-car" camera and the low angle "speed shot", which are now considered standard in all telecasts of auto racing. Motor Racing Network was broadcasting the race on the radio, and their broadcasters include Dick Berggren.
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Famous quotes containing the word television:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.”
—Salvador Dali (1904–1989)
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)