"We had a non-partisan philosophy. As we tried to bridge the East-West divide we also sought to overcome political ideology itself. Television offered us the perfect means for doing that, because we could take traditional enemies and put them in the same electronic space." –DAVID HOFFMAN, co-founder and current president of Internews Network |
1982
June 8, 1982.
In a speech to the British House of Commons, then-president Ronald
Reagan makes his "evil empire" speech about the Soviet Union.
July 26, 1982. "Order Internews letterhead." This datebook entry by Evelyn Messinger, who co-founded Internews Network along with Kim Spencer and David Hoffman, marks the birth of Internews in San Francisco, California.
August 1982. The first Internews project, funded by the Kendall Foundation, is to compile archives of films, TV shows, and documentaries about nuclear war, for use by independent producers and networks.
1982. Kim Spencer and Evelyn Messinger produce the award-winning PBS documentary, "Thinking Twice About Nuclear War."
US FESTIVAL/OLIVER MONROE |
September 1982. Internews helps produce
the first "spacebridge," a
two-way satellite link-up between Soviet youth in Moscow and Americans
at the US Festival in San Bernadino, California, a high-tech rock concert
sponsored by Apple Computer co-founder
Steve Wozniak.
"Internews' goal was to use television as a way to bridge major world boundaries, to bring people together across their geographical and ideological divisions." –KIM SPENCER, co-founder and past president of Internews Network |
1983
October 1983. Internews produces the ground-breaking "Moscow Link," which joins top physicists and biologists in the Soviet Union and the US to discuss the risk of nuclear winter in a conference headed by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich. This marks the first time that senior scientists of the USSR publicly acknowledge the risk of nuclear war to their own people.
1983. Kim Spencer produces "The First Fifty Years: Reflections on US-Soviet Relations," which won the DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.
1984
"Internews . . . had a large vision: Namely, that media programmes could be used to reduce tensions between so-called enemy countries and that such programmes would lessen the threat of war." –JOHN MARKS, The Power of Media: A Handbook for Peacebuilders |
1985
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1985. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail
Gorbachev is elected General Secretary of the Communist Party. His programs
of glasnost (political openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring)
contribute to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.
1985. Internews produces a teleconference on global warming and the greenhouse effect linking 60 universities in the US, Mexico and Canada.
1985. In a complex technological feat, the Beyond War spacebridge facilitated
by Internews links leaders of six nations across five continents.
1986
1986. Internews helps produce the US-Soviet "Citizen’s Summit" spacebridge moderated by Phil Donahue and Vladimir Posner with audiences in Seattle and Leningrad.
1986. Internews produces "Chernobyl and Three Mile Island" for PBS, also aired on Soviet TV, in which US and Soviet scientists discuss the implications of nuclear power accidents. Altogether Internews produced or contributed to the production of more than a dozen spacebridges.
"Millions of TV viewers in both countries saw Soviet participants in the discussion openly talking about things which had been taboo in public in the not remote past . . ." –MOSCOW TASS, October 16, 1987, on Capital to Capital |
1987
1987. Evelyn Messinger produces a pilot with the BBC for Planet 3, a weekly news magazine with a global perspective, which is the precursor for Link TV, twelve years later.
1987. The spacebridge format culminates in the Capital
to Capital series,
produced by ABC News in association with Soviet State TV and Internews
through 1990. Members of the US Congress are linked via satellite with
Deputies in the Supreme Soviet. Their live, uncensored dialogues are
broadcast to up to 200 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, as well as in the US. Moderated by Peter Jennings and Leonid
Zolotarevsky, the series earns Internews an Emmy Award.
1989
July 1989. Internews moves its headquarters from San Francisco to Arcata, California when David Hoffman becomes president.
1989. When a devastating earthquake strikes Armenia, Kim Spencer and French producer Patrice Barrat arrange the only live satellite transmission of the disaster and rescue efforts. Major commercial networks broadcast over 20 hours of this footage.
BERLIN WALL/FREDERIK RAMM |
December 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall is the most tangible sign that the Cold War is ending.