TV revives bygone tradition of airing the national anthem

It is one of popular culture’s generational divides: whether you are old enough to remember when television stations concluded the night’s programming with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Decades ago, viewers would see a slideshow of American imagery, perhaps a mountain range or frothy shoreline and then — hours of static.

Now, the early morning hours are filled with rebroadcasts and infomercials, eliminating any practical reason for a formal sign off.

But recently, TV broadcasters have been reintroducing the practice of playing the national anthem once a day, pairing it with the same flavor of patriotic imagery, but in high definition and with multilayered audio. Some viewers might hear political overtones, too.

Gray Television, which has 145 stations, mostly in small and midsize markets, made it a companywide practice several months ago. Two other companies followed: CBS, at its 27 corporate-owned stations, including those in New York and Los Angeles; and Nexstar Media Group, one of the largest owners of television stations in the country. Within five months, the national anthem has become a daily part of programming at more than 350 stations across the country.

Hilton H. Howell Jr., Gray’s chief executive, said that he wanted to bring the anthem back to local television after decades of it being a mostly abandoned tradition. Howell, 57, grew up in a broadcasting family in Waco and remembered the station that his grandfather founded, KWTX, signing off with the anthem around midnight and then going snowy.

Gray went through a casting process to find the right people for the video accompanying the music. The 1-minute, 45-second clip includes a 9-year-old Florida girl, Reina Özbay, belting the anthem into a microphone, a uniformed soldier giving a salute and a young boy with his arms wrapped around a serviceman, perhaps his father. The video flips through an array of scenery: a band of wild horses gallops across a rural expanse, a whale’s tail dips into the water, a harvesting machine pushes through a field of crops, an American flag ripples in front of an industriallooking town.

Stations owned by Gray play the company’s national anthem video in the early morning, typically around 4 a.m., though several schedule it for a second run before or after their evening newscasts, Howell said. Nexstar stations — which now number nearly 200 after the company acquired Tribune Media Co. — and most of the CBS-owned stations also play their version of the anthem before dawn.

Gray and Nexstar executives said the reason to bring back the anthem was simple: encouraging national unity at a time of deep division in the country and, as Howell put it, “bringing back a great tradition of television.” (CBS did not make any executives available for comment.)

“This is a purely nonpolitical statement by our company,” Howell said.

Still, the decision to revive the anthem tradition comes at a time when overt allegiance to “The Star-Spangled Banner” has become one of the lines that separate blue and red

America.

Regardless of their intentions, Mark Clague, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, said that in an era in which support of the anthem has become a “loyalty test,” it is difficult to frame its reintroduction to the airwaves as apolitical.

“It is somewhat provocative to bring the anthem to the fore in a new way at a moment of tension in this country,” he said.

It wasn’t until 1931 that “The Star-Spangled Banner” became the official national anthem. Around the same time, shortwave radio allowed Americans to hear broadcasts from overseas, and some noticed that stations in other countries concluded their programs by playing their anthems, Clague said.

In a 1935 letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Rep. Virginia E. Jenckes of Indiana urged the agency to suggest to American radio stations that they sign off with

“The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Television adopted the practice from radio,

Clague said. Fresh off World War II, the national anthem sign-offs of the 1950s were filled with military images. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the Vietnam War was dividing the country, the imagery centered more often on local street scenes and community snapshots.

The anthem videos produced this year include a mixture of militaristic and community-based images. CBS borrowed parts of Gray’s anthem video (they were particularly impressed by the young girl’s vocal rendition), adding visuals from cities where they have stations.