New Books In Journalism

Howard Cosell was fond of saying that American television in the 1970s was dominated by three C’s, representing each of the broadcast networks: revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, NBC’s late-night talk show host Johnny Carson, and Cosell himself, the marquee sports announcer for the ABC network.  Cosell was known for an inflated sense of self-importance, but in this claim he was accurate.  From his interviews of Muhammad Ali on Wide World of Sports in the Sixties, through his 13-year tenure in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, Cosell came to be the most prominent personality in sports television and one of the most recognizable figures–certainly, the most recognized voice–in all of American popular culture. Throughout his career, Cosell aspired to be more like the trusted journalist Cronkite than the entertainer Carson.  And one of the main points of historian John Bloom’s biography, There You Have It: The Life, Legacy, and Legend of Howard Cosell (University of