Paul Harvey, who died Saturday at age 90, had been delivering his “News and Comment” nationally for ABC Radio Networks since 1951 (remember when Mitt Romney briefly stood in for Harvey in 2008)? TV Barn’s Aaron Barnhart, perhaps for the uninitiated, located a very present-day way to describe something of Harvey’s distinctive style (emphasis mine):
Finally, a word about Paul Harvey’s non-verbal communication. No one in radio got away with the silences that he did. His pauses weren’t just pregnant, they were Nadya Suleman pregnant. They were amazingly long, by radio standards. They challenged the listener’s assumption that an interruption to the flow of continuous noise meant something was wrong. Nothing was wrong; Paul Harvey just wanted the listener’s attention back, in case it had drifted. The great communicator was speaking to his invisible audience with invisible words. And they listened.
Another media pioneer passed away recently: Ann Bryan Mariano. Mariano, “one of the first female combat correspondents covering the Vietnam War,” in 1965 opened the Saigon bureau of the Overseas Weekly, “a scrappy German-based tabloid that saw itself as an irreverent alternative to the semiofficial Stars and Stripes” and reported on “war profiteers, officers involved in the black market, pot smoking among soldiers, and racial prejudice in the Army.” Mariano “sued the Pentagon to keep her publication on military-base newsstands,” in addition to fighting the Pentagon “for battlefield access…because she was a woman.”
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.