Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television

Joel Brinkley

Harcourt Brace, 1998 - Business & Economics - 447 pages

HDTV - digital, high-definition television - is an invention so far-reaching that most people cannot yet grasp its full significance. But the new sets are arriving in stores, and we are in the midst of a revolution in television. In Defining Vision, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joel Brinkley takes us inside the creation of HDTV, into a titanic competition between some of the world's most important high-tech corporations battling for a prize worth billions of dollars. Brinkley tells the story from deep inside the laboratories and boardrooms where the race was run. There, scheming contestants employed duplicity, extortion, and, occasionally, creative genius. At the same time, government leaders manipulated the race to their own ends, promoting it one moment and betraying it the next.

Contents

• HDTV: 3
• Washington to the rescue: 32
• 3: 49

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television; Harvest book
• Author: Joel Brinkley
• Edition: revised
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace, 1998
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Jan 13, 2010
• ISBN: 0156005972, 9780156005975
• Length: 447 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Government & Business; Business & Economics / Industries / Computers & Information Technology; Business & Economics / Industries / Media & Communications; Business & Economics / International / Economics & Trade; Performing Arts / Business Aspects; Performing Arts / General; Performing Arts / Television / General; Performing Arts / Television / History & Criticism; Technology & Engineering / History; Technology & Engineering / Television & Video