Sig Mickelson

Sig Mickelson, who has died aged 86, was one of the most influential executives in American television. In the early 1950s, he brought ideas to the infant medium which continue to shape television news presentation to this day.

In his years with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Mickelson developed the notion of one familiar face anchoring the news reports from multiple correspondents. He also pioneered the use of computers for election results analysis, and devised hard-hitting current affairs programmes which were widely imitated.

His early experience was as a radio reporter in his home town of Minneapolis, where he joined the local CBS station in 1943. By 1948, he was providing detailed coverage of that year's political conventions for the national network. In 1949, his skills brought him to the company's New York headquarters to inject some professionalism into its nascent television news service. News bulletins were pretty gruesome at the time. In 1948, CBS had been first in the field with a 15-minute nightly offering called Douglas Edwards With The News but, essentially, it was a rip-and-read sequence of news-agency material, occasionally padded out with newsreel. CBS's entire reporting staff numbered 14. In later years, Mickelson acknowledged that he inherited "a hybrid monstrosity", a public service programme lurking in a world of showbiz commercialism. In 1951, he was made head of news and public affairs and told to sort out the mess.

There had already been indications during 1951 of a potentially lucrative audience for news. Live coverage of Senator Estes Kefauver's hearings on the mafia had occasionally achieved 100% ratings for the then 108 local television stations. There were similar results when General Douglas MacArthur made his regal progress across America after President Truman sacked him for nuclear brinkmanship.

Mickelson's first coup came the following year, when he managed to get enough commercial sponsors for CBS to broadcast gavel-to-gavel coverage of the US conventions. The choice of party candidates had been televised experimentally in 1948, but transmissions only went out on three stations and the audience was minuscule. Now the halls were alive with cameras and, much to the sponsors' glee, attracted a nationwide audience of 60m.

The presidential election of November 1952 brought what can be seen as Mickelson's most fundamental gift to television news presentation. Remington Rand had told him about a machine it claimed would predict the results. "I knew that wasn't true," Mickelson recalled later, "but I knew it might speed up the analysis".

On inspection, he was unexpectedly impressed by Univac I, and sent a couple of staff to Philadelphia to sit with it on election night. The opinion polls had run heavily in favour of the Democrat Adlai Stevenson but, as the first returns came in, Univac predicted victory for the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Initially, Mickelson was too dumbfounded to broadcast the prediction.

In the end, the machine forecast 438 electoral college votes for Eisenhower and 93 for Stevenson, just 1% away from the actual result, 442 to 89. Univac also calculated the popular vote to within 3%. Since then, no news organisation has dared forswear computer analysis in its election coverage.

One of Mickelson's early decisions after taking over the news division had been to hire a reporter called Fred Friendly (who eventually rose to run CBS News). His job was to work with the network's star correspondent, Ed Murrow, on the documentary series See It Now. Their collaboration, backed by Mickelson in the face of corporate anxiety, resulted in one of the most famous programmes in American television history.

At the height of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade, when even the White House was afraid to confront him head-on, See It Now mercilessly dissected the senator's campaign, exposing the half-truths and lies on which it was founded. It was not the cause, but it certainly galvanised enough public support to secure McCarthy's downfall.

But, like everyone in commercial television, Mickelson had to live with the medium's financial realities, and its implicit belief that the dearest must be the most desirable. Having built Walter Cronkite into one of America's best-known faces, and expanded his nightly appearance to 30 minutes, Mickelson persuaded him to hire an agent. Cronkite, then earning about $150 a week, began the trend which now brings huge salaries to people of pretty average talent who can attract a large audience.

Mickelson, who left CBS in 1961 to work for Time Television, told an interviewer in his later years that things had not worked out as he had hoped. "We were hoping that we'd get more voters to the polls, that we'd have better-informed candidates, and that the X-ray eye would expose all the charlatanism. I don't know whether we have better candidates, but certainly we don't have more people going to the polls, and surely there is no exposure of the charlatans anymore".

Mickelson is survived by his second wife, Elena, two children from his first marriage, and two stepchildren.

Sig Mickelson, journalist, born May 24 1913; died March 29 2000

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKaVrMBwfo9pZ2ilkad8c4WOoKyaqpSerq%2B7waKrrpminrK0eseaqaiklJ%2BupLfSqKU%3D