That's the Way It Is: A History of Television News in America

That’s the Way It Is

That’s the Way It Is

A History of Television News in America

Charles L. Ponce de Leon

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Charles L. Ponce de Leon is professor of history and American studies at California State University, Long Beach.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47245-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-25609-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago9780226256092.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ponce de Leon, Charles L. (Charles Leonard), author.

That’s the way it is : a history of television news in America / Charles L. Ponce de Leon.

pages; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-47245-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-226-47245-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-25609-2 (e-book) 1. Television broadcasting of news—United States—History. 2. Television broadcasting of news—Social aspects—United States. I. Title.

HE8700.8.P66 2015

070.1′950973—dc23

2014040798

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Lynn

Contents

Prologue

Acknowledgments

1 Beginnings

2 The Voice of God

3 Public Alternatives

4 News You Can Use

5 Rebirth

6 The New Entertainment

7 Fade to Black

Notes

Index

Prologue

Like many people my age, I grew up with television news. My parents watched it every night at dinnertime, and I remember well the luminous glow of our black-and-white screen and the grim visages of the anchormen we welcomed into our home. My father liked The Huntley-Brinkley Report on NBC, and was especially fond of Chet Huntley. My mother cheerfully submitted to his viewing preferences—though when he began to travel more frequently for business, she switched to The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. After Huntley’s retirement in 1970, my father watched CBS, too.

It’s Cronkite’s program that I recall most vividly. It was in the late 1960s that I began to watch the news rather than merely notice it in the background as I played with toys or daydreamed at the dinner table. And it was The CBS Evening News that helped to shatter the illusion that I lived in a cloistered, idyllic world. Cronkite and his intrepid correspondents made me aware of Vietnam, of the civil rights and anti-war movements, and of new social and cultural trends that, to a child, seemed bewildering. They told me about the crime and violence that were sweeping the nation, and were often on hand to describe and explain riveting events like the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the mayhem that occurred at the Democratic National Convention in August 1968. I remember the RFK shooting particularly well. My mother was very fond of him, and she allowed me to stay up late to watch the election returns and see him declare victory in our home state’s primary. So I was awake and watching when, shortly after his victory speech, we were told he had been shot—and even got a quick glimpse of him lying, fatally wounded, on the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen floor.

I remember television providing us with good news, too, including the momentous Apollo 11 moon landing. Our family had closely followed the progress of the American space program, and its success in putting a man on the moon was truly awe-inspiring—despite our having to wait for what seemed like an eternity while the TV displayed the same unchanging image and Cronkite and his associates struggled to fill the hours with information and commentary. But it seemed to bring us mostly bad news, and by the early 1970s we tuned in with a sense of trepidation, as the political and cultural upheavals of the era were soon accompanied by economic problems and evidence that the era of postwar prosperity was over.

By the mid-1970s I not only watched the evening news every night but also read our local newspaper—and, on many days, the San Francisco Chronicle, which I delivered as a paperboy. I avidly followed the Watergate scandal and the revelations unearthed by the many congressional hearings that were held in the wake of the Vietnam War. The more I learned, the more I came to perceive a blurring between the once distant public world covered by journalists and my own adolescent private world. As we waited in line for gas, drove by the squalid urban ghettos of San Francisco or Oakland, or encountered the increasing number of disaffected young people whose contempt for the postwar American Way of Life was readily evident in their appearance and rebellious posturing, I began to see myself, my friends, and my family as participants in the grand drama of our national life, a drama conveyed so evocatively by journalists. Somehow or another, everything seemed connected—though, at the time, I scarcely understood how and, distracted by adolescence, made few efforts to figure it out.

Gradually, however, I stopped watching television news. In my first couple of years in college, I even stopped reading newspapers. I would watch Walter Cronkite—and then Dan Rather—when I was home and my parents did. But the rhythms of college life and postcollegiate young adulthood weren’t compatible with my old news habit. When I began my graduate studies in the mid-1980s, I would sometimes tune into the CBS Evening News, but I found it less satisfying, and I soon embraced a jaundiced view of TV news that reflected my professional aspirations as a PhD student and budding academic—that television news was bland and insipid and a poor substitute for the more substantive intellectual nourishment provided by prestige newspapers and magazines. Accordingly, when I resumed following the news in the late 1980s, it was by becoming a regular reader of the New York Times.

I still watched TV news from time to time. My wife and I especially enjoyed 60 Minutes, and we turned on Dan Rather or Peter Jennings when something big occurred—like the fall of the Berlin Wall—or for election coverage. If a story was particularly big, we would tune in for several days, sometimes even weeks, to follow it to its conclusion. In the early 1990s, when we finally got cable, we also started watching CNN. Yet when I watched TV news, even CNN, I couldn’t help but notice that it had changed since the days when I had been an avid viewer. The changes became especially apparent in the mid-1990s, when the networks and CNN feasted on the O. J. Simpson case. It got to the point where I could hardly watch at all.

There was a ready explanation for what had happened. I first encountered it in the late 1980s in articles about the television industry that I read in the Times, and it gained wider currency when several retired television journalists, including Cronkite, invoked it their memoirs and in often testy interviews. It was picked up and embellished by TV critics and much of the intellectual community, of which, as a young historian, I was now a part. Louis Menand calls it the decline-of-TV-news narrative. It argues that TV news was dumbed-down and transformed into infotainment, and that the people responsible for this were the suits, the corporate executives who gained control of the networks in the 1980s and 1990s and demanded that news programs generate higher ratings and make money.

According to declinists, if TV news changed for the worse, it was no fault of television journalists, who were powerless to resist the heavy hand of corporate influence. And, in most accounts, it was no fault of the public, who largely rejected the new-style TV news of the 1990s in spite of network efforts to pander to them. This is why, declinists claim, the audience for network news has plummeted since the early 1980s. Like me, viewers were turned off by the very features that producers had added to make television news more interesting and entertaining. Between the lines of many versions of the decline-of-TV-news narrative is an unspoken assumption that the public is hankering for real news, and that a courageous return to principles can reverse the industry’s decline and somehow recreate the national community that we like to think huddled around their TV sets in the days of Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley.

It’s a seductive tale and comports with many of the facts. It’s true that the new owners who took over the networks instituted major changes and insisted that their news divisions make a profit—and that, as a result, the content, format, and look of TV news programs changed in many of the ways noted by declinists. And it’s true that at least some viewers were alienated by the new emphasis on infotainment and news you can use.

But most accounts of TV news’ decline downplay the larger context and the industry’s complex history, and convey only half of the truth. The aim of this book is to tell the whole story—to situate television news in its appropriate historical context and see its evolution without the mythic blinders that have led many to regard the era of Cronkite as a kind of golden age.¹

That means facing up to some important facts. The first is that infotainment has been a feature of television news from the outset. This is because television was conceived mainly as a medium of entertainment—not just by the men in charge of the industry but by the vast majority of the public, who made their preferences very clear as early as the mid-1950s. The predominance of entertainment programming on TV made news, which often deals with disturbing facts, an awkward fit, especially when journalists sought to do more than provide pictures of big events and ventured into interpretive and analytic reporting. To make their programs compatible with the sitcoms, dramas, and variety shows that dominated the medium, the producers of TV news were compelled to make at least some news programs entertaining as well as informative, usually by mixing hard news and soft features. This was a formula that had been successful in mass-circulation print journalism, and its use by television journalists made perfect sense at the time. Its effectiveness on TV exerted a powerful influence on all subsequent news programming. It was the key to the success of Today and 60 Minutes, and following this path became irresistible when the industry became more competitive in later years.

This brings us to the second important fact to acknowledge about the history of TV news. During the years when infotainment was kept at least partially at bay—confined to only some news programs, and outweighed on most others by hard news—it was because of peculiar historical and institutional factors that limited competition and allowed network executives to be unusually supportive and indulgent of their news divisions. A kind of protective cocoon enabled the network news divisions to grow and inspired television journalists to become increasingly ambitious about joining the journalistic establishment and providing viewers with something more than a headline service. It was in this period, the early 1960s through the late 1970s, that the producers of TV news developed their most sophisticated programs, and sought, as much as possible, to draw a sharp line between their programs and those broadcast by the entertainment divisions.

In the 1970s, however, the broader social, economic and political context began to change, and the TV news industry began to be affected by new forces, including heightened competition from local news and cable TV. The protective cocoon in which the networks’ news divisions had briefly flourished was battered and began to unravel, and television journalists felt a new pressure to shift the balance toward soft news. And in the 1980s, amid the rush to deregulate industries and increase consumer choice, the competition from cable became even more intense.

This might not have been a problem if the television news habit among Americans had been deeply engrained, and if most of them had appreciated the efforts of network journalists to provide a reasonably broad and sophisticated overview of the day’s most important news stories. But that habit was not deeply engrained, and, from the start, many Americans were suspicious and resentful of network journalists and did not like the brand of news they produced, disconcerting facts that journalists were forced to confront when the spread of cable gave viewers more choices, and, after a peak in 1981, the percentage of television households watching news programs progressively declined. Not surprisingly, the only network news programs that retained their audience were prime-time newsmagazines and the morning news programs—the ones most infused with entertainment values. Meanwhile, the minority of Americans who liked following the news on TV found a more congenial source of it, CNN, one of the great success stories of cable television.

This brings us to the third and perhaps most important fact that needs to be understood about the history of TV news. If large numbers of Americans watched the networks’ evening newscasts during the Cronkite era, it was because, for many years, they had virtually no other options. Before cable, few television markets had more than a handful of stations, and in most markets, the networks broadcast their flagship evening newscasts at exactly the same time. Equally important, the Federal Communications Commission actively protected the networks from would-be competitors and forced their affiliates to abide by relatively strict public-interest requirements that made broadcasting at least some news a necessity. There were also cultural and political forces encouraging Americans to follow the news. Politicians, educators, ministers, prominent corporate executives, and the leaders of numerous community organizations ardently believed that knowledge of local, national, and international developments was a civic obligation, and they were hopeful that television in particular would help to create more informed and responsible citizens. They promoted this belief throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and though many Americans never embraced it, others fell under its sway.

When, thanks largely to cable and the FCC’s deregulation of broadcasting, viewers suddenly had options, they gradually stopped watching television news, especially the network newscasts that had commanded such a large audience in previous decades. And, in the early 2000s, when Americans turned en masse to the Internet, the exodus from television news accelerated. By 2010, a dwindling number of mostly elderly Americans watched news on television—or even on cable. People were getting their news from other sources, or not at all. Competition and consumer choice had robbed television journalists of their audience—despite their best efforts to hang on to it.

But broader changes in the culture were important, too. For a variety of reasons, the broad elite consensus that had encouraged Americans to follow the news disintegrated. Television journalists began to be accused of bias, and many people lost respect for the both the news media and the institutions they routinely covered. The allure of self-interest and private life—always powerful and a potential distraction from the responsibilities of citizenship—became overwhelming as Americans came to embrace a new expressive individualism and found more varied ways of engaging in the pursuit of happiness. By the 1990s, many people didn’t feel obliged to follow the news, and new intellectual trends seemed to justify this withdrawal from public life. For many, keeping up with the news, particularly with more than the briefest headlines, was too much work. Instead, they devoted their time and energy to more enjoyable and personally meaningful activities. And many who continued to read newspapers or watch TV news felt little guilt about only paying attention to subjects that were interesting to them—like the O. J. Simpson case, rather than, say, the complicated American health care crisis or developments in the Middle East that were contributing to the growth of radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda.

The point of this book is that TV news didn’t degenerate into infotainment. It changed—in some respects for the better, in other respects for the worse—largely in response to the preferences of viewers. These changes, in turn, recalibrated the expectations of viewers and encouraged them to accept additional ones, providing journalists with further justification for innovation. Without the protection of a regulatory cocoon and cultural forces encouraging civic engagement and knowledge of the wider world, the television news industry became subject to market forces, like so many other things in America during the latter decades of the twentieth century. It was adapted to a larger media culture—indeed, an entire economy—that places the highest priority on giving people what they want.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The imperative to satisfy the diverse tastes of the consuming public has made cable TV in particular astonishingly diverse—the antithesis of the vast wasteland that network TV was in the early 1960s. And though there is more dreck on television than ever before, and the worst programs are far more puerile and vulgar than anything broadcast in the network era, the number of interesting and distinguished programs that have appeared on cable since the 1990s boggles the mind. But it’s an open question whether news, as opposed to entertainment, is something that should be determined entirely by the market, particularly since some knowledge of national and international affairs is essential to be a thoughtful and autonomous citizen in a representative democracy. Can a nation where most people don’t want to know about things that don’t interest them remain a functioning democracy?

This book is not a comprehensive history of television news. It neglects to mention many noteworthy programs and individuals, and its discussion of some important trends is perfunctory—academic experts in the field might even say superficial. From a scholarly perspective, a comprehensive history may be sorely needed. But it would be so massive and detailed that few nonexperts would have the stamina to read it, and my highest priority is reaching a relatively wide audience.

Nor it is a species of media studies. It does not provide in-depth readings of particular texts or present an argument about the meanings embedded in television journalism. And it is notably lacking in its reliance on theory. I’m quite familiar with this literature, and learned from it in the course of my research. But I’m a historian, and I’ve come to value a feature of my discipline that differentiates it from most other academic fields—its capacity for storytelling, for marshaling evidence from disparate sources to tell us what happened and why.

Accordingly, this book is a narrative history. It tells a story. It chronicles the rise and evolution of television news from the 1940s through the first decade of the new millennium. It focuses mostly on the networks and the cable news channels, but I also discuss local news and some syndicated programming, especially when it was influential. Unlike a comprehensive history, it dwells on the highlights and most significant trends, and it pays special attention to the executives, producers, and journalists who were responsible for the field’s most important innovations—figures such as Reuven Frank, Don Hewitt, Fred Friendly, Richard Salant, Roone Arledge, Ted Turner, Roger Ailes, Katie Couric, and Jon Stewart. Most important of all, it documents their work in a way that is true to their lived experience—as professionals committed to public enlightenment who worked for organizations that were also forced to compete for viewers and ratings.

To produce it, I consulted a wide range of sources: oral histories, memoirs, and autobiographies; newspaper, magazine, and trade press articles; detailed reports and data on the television industry available on various websites; books about specific programs, genres, and news organizations; and more general works about the media and American society and culture. And I watched lots of TV news, much of it online, but also at selected archives. This was an eye-opening experience. I had never seen many early news programs, and my opinions of some, like See It Now, had been based on inaccurate assumptions about their content. I was also startled by some of the interesting and unusual topics that journalists have covered—some them utterly ridiculous, but others remarkably timely and prescient. And I was amazed at how producers in the industry’s early years, despite limited technology, were able to produce such compelling programs.

This is what the publishing industry calls a synthetic history, drawn in large part from the yeoman work of others. I didn’t conduct any interviews, nor did I attempt to access the written archives of news organizations or the personal papers of important figures. Lacking the time and resources for such research, I decided to make do with more readily available sources. Thankfully, they were quite revealing, providing me with a well-rounded picture of the forces that have shaped television journalism over the years. But the book presents a new argument, and it connects the history of television news to the broader currents of recent US history, a subject I have been teaching and writing about for twenty years. It’s my knowledge of the latter that differentiates it from virtually all other books written about the subject and makes it potentially interesting to readers who are neither scholars nor media industry insiders.

I conceived this book in the summer of 2009 after a research trip to Syracuse University, where I went to examine a collection of oral histories of television industry pioneers. At the time, I was looking for a new book project and was vaguely interested in writing about some facet of television. The oral histories were quite provocative, and I was struck in particular by the insights of people who had worked in television news. There, right in front of me, was evidence that seemed to contradict the decline-of-TV-news narrative. I was intrigued, and in subsequent weeks, after additional research, I resolved to figure out exactly what happened. This book is the fruit of that project, my effort to correct a widespread misperception I once shared. It would be nice if there had been a cohesive, well-informed national community back in TV’s golden age, and if television news had played an important role in forging it. But that doesn’t seem to have been the case—no matter how much we might wish it to be true. And that’s the way it is, to borrow from Walter Cronkite’s nightly sign-off.

Learning about television news has been a sobering experience. Fully understanding the challenges they faced, I came to really admire many executives, producers, and journalists. And I gained a greater appreciation of the constraints that impinge on virtually everyone who works in the mass media and commercial popular culture industries. It’s a tough business that requires them to respond to the whims of public taste and the market. Give the people what they want. It’s a logical mandate, and in many fields it can inspire feats of remarkable ingenuity. But, for very good reasons, it makes many journalists anxious. Perhaps it should make us anxious, too.

Acknowledgments

Compared to that of most of my colleagues, my version of the scholarly life is rather solitary. I’m not one for the conference circuit, and I didn’t circulate early versions of my book manuscript very widely for feedback. But I was the beneficiary of important advice and support, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank some of the individuals and institutions that made this book possible.

First, I’d like to commend the archivists at the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University. Their television industry oral histories were pivotal in enabling me to conceive this project. I owe even more to John Lynch and his staff at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive in Nashville. They were unflaggingly helpful and made my research there rewarding and pleasurable. I also want to thank archivists at UCLA’s Film and Television Archive and at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills. Though I never visited their new brick-and-mortar facility, I was also assisted by curators and archivists at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago; their online archive of programs predating 1968 was invaluable to me, and I appreciated their willingness to help me deal with various technical snafus that I experienced while conducting online research. Jaka Bartolj was especially helpful, and I’m very grateful to him for assistance with some of the book’s illustrations. Finally, I want to thank Roman Kochan, Tracey Mayfield, and the staff of the California State University, Long Beach, Library, who provided me with interlibrary loans and access to hard-to-find periodical sources.

I want to thank several friends and colleagues who discussed this project with me and gave me sage advice, particularly in its earliest stages, when I hardly knew what I was doing: Thomas LeBien, Louis Masur, Jackson Lears, and especially Richard Wightman Fox. I want to express particular gratitude to Dan Einstein at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, who steered me to a number of different sources and archives. After a panel discussion in October 2007, my old Purchase College colleague Michelle Stewart suggested that I write a book on television news—a suggestion I dismissed out of hand because, subscribing to the declinist view, I thought the subject would be too negative. Kudos to Michelle for planting that particular seed, though it took a while for it to sprout. I wrote this book while assuming a new job at Long Beach State, and I’m grateful to the administration and my new colleagues in the Department of History for providing support and creating an atmosphere that allowed me to complete it.

Doug Mitchell was enthusiastic about this project from the moment he first heard about it, and I want to thank him and others at the University of Chicago Press for help getting it through the pipeline and finally reaching the public. Carol Fisher Saller was a discerning copyeditor, and I’m grateful for her sharp eye and admirable attention to detail. I also want to thank the anonymous readers of the proposal and two versions of the manuscript. They provided invaluable advice and helped me from making some embarrassing errors.

Finally, I want to thank my family for their love and emotional support. This is the first book of mine that my children, now in or just out of college, are actually eager to read, and I hope they realize the many ways in which their presence in my life made it possible. My wife, Lynn, read the entire manuscript, and I’m grateful for the time she set aside from her busy schedule to provide advice and editorial comments. More important, I’m grateful for her love, understanding, and willingness to put up with my persistent self-absorption and absent-mindedness, maladies that become particularly acute when I’m in the throes of a book project. Lynn, this one’s for you.

1

Beginnings

Few technologies have stirred the utopian imagination like television. Virtually from the moment that research produced the first breakthroughs that made it more than a science fiction fantasy, its promoters began gushing about how it would change the world. Perhaps the most effusive was David Sarnoff. Like the hero of a dime novel, Sarnoff had come to America as a nearly penniless immigrant child, and had risen from lowly office boy to the presidency of RCA, a leading manufacturer of radio receivers and the parent company of the nation’s biggest radio network, NBC. More than anyone else, it was Sarnoff who had recognized the potential of wireless as a form of broadcasting—a way of transmitting from a single source to a geographically dispersed audience. Sarnoff had built NBC into a juggernaut, the network with the largest number of affiliates and the most popular programs. He had also become the industry’s loudest cheerleader, touting its contributions to progress and the American Way of Life. Having blessed the world with the miracle of radio, he promised Americans an even more astounding marvel, a device that would bring them sound and pictures over the air, using the same invisible frequencies.¹

In countless speeches heralding television’s imminent arrival, Sarnoff rhapsodized about how it would transform American life and encourage global communication and international solidarity. Television will be a mighty window, through which people in all walks of life, rich and poor alike, will be able to see for themselves, not only the small world around us but the larger world of which we are a part, he proclaimed in 1945, as the Second World War was nearing an end and Sarnoff and RCA eagerly anticipated an increase in public demand for the new technology.²

Sarnoff predicted that television would become the American people’s principal source of entertainment, education and news, bringing them a wealth of program options. It would increase the public’s appreciation for high culture and, when supplemented by universal schooling, enable Americans to attain the highest general cultural level of any people in the history of the world. Among the new medium’s outstanding contributions, he argued, would be its ability to bring news and sporting events to the listener while they are occurring, and build on the news programs that NBC and the other networks had already developed for radio. He saw no conflicts or potential problems. Action-adventure programs, mysteries, soap operas, situation comedies, and variety shows would coexist harmoniously with high-toned drama, ballet, opera, classical music performances, and news and public affairs programs. And they would all be supported by advertising, making it unnecessary for the United States to move to a system of government control, as in Europe and the UK. Television in the US would remain free.³

Yet Sarnoff’s booster rhetoric overlooked some thorny issues. Radio in the US wasn’t really free. It was thoroughly commercialized, and this had a powerful influence on the range of programs available to listeners. To pay for program development, the networks and individual stations sold airtime to advertisers. Advertisers, in turn, produced programs—or selected ones created by independent producers—that they hoped would attract listeners. The whole point of sponsorship was to reach the public and make them aware of your products, most often through recurrent advertisements. Though owners of radios didn’t have to pay an annual fee for the privilege of listening, as did citizens in other countries, they were forced to endure the commercials that accompanied the majority of programs.

This had significant consequences. As the development of radio made clear, some kinds of programs were more popular than others, and advertisers were naturally more interested in sponsoring ones that were likely to attract large numbers of listeners. These were nearly always entertainment programs, especially shows that drew on formulas that had proven successful in other fields—music and variety shows, comedy, and serial fiction. More off-beat and esoteric programs were sometimes able to find sponsors who backed them for the sake of prestige; from 1937 to 1954, for example, General Motors sponsored live performances by NBC’s acclaimed Symphony of the Air. But most cultural, news, and public affairs programs were unsponsored, making them unprofitable for the networks and individual stations. Thus in the bountiful mix envisioned by Sarnoff, certain kinds of broadcasts were more valuable than others. If high culture and news and public affairs programs were to thrive, their presence on network schedules would have to be justified by something other than their contribution to the bottom line.⁴

The most compelling reason was provided by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Established after Congress passed the Federal Communications Act in 1934, the FCC was responsible for overseeing the broadcasting industry and the nation’s airwaves, which, at least in theory, belonged to the public. Rather than selling frequencies, which would have violated this principle, the FCC granted individual parties station licenses. These allowed licensees sole possession of a frequency to broadcast to listeners in their community or region. This system allocated a scarce resource—the nation’s limited number of frequencies—and made possession of a license a lucrative asset for businessmen eager to exploit broadcasting’s commercial potential. Licenses granted by the FCC were temporary, and all licensees were required to go through a periodic renewal process. As part of this process, they had to demonstrate to the FCC that at least some of the programs they aired were in the public interest. Inspired by a deep suspicion of commercialization, which had spread widely among the public during the early 1900s, the FCC’s public-interest requirement was conceived as a countervailing force that would prevent broadcasting from falling entirely under the sway of market forces. Its champions hoped that it might protect programming that did not pay and ensure that the nation’s airwaves weren’t dominated by the cheap, sensational fare that, reformers feared, would proliferate if broadcasting was unregulated.⁵

In practice, however, the FCC’s oversight of broadcasting proved to be relatively lax. More concerned about NBC’s enormous market power—it controlled two networks of affiliates, NBC Red and NBC Blue—FCC commissioners in the 1930s were unusually sympathetic to the businessmen who owned individual stations and possessed broadcast licenses and made it quite easy for them to renew their licenses. They were allowed to air a bare minimum of public-affairs programming and fill their schedules with the entertainment programs that appealed to listeners and sponsors alike. By interpreting the public-interest requirement so broadly, the FCC encouraged the commercialization of broadcasting and unwittingly tilted the playing field against any programs—including news and public affairs—that could not compete with the entertainment shows that were coming to dominate the medium.⁶

Nevertheless, news and public-affairs programs were able to find a niche on commercial radio. But until the outbreak of the Second World War, it wasn’t a very large or comfortable one, and it was more a result of economic competition than the dictates of the FCC. Occasional news bulletins and regular election returns were broadcast by individual stations and the fledgling networks in the 1920s. They became more frequent in the 1930s, when the networks, chafing at the restrictions placed on them by the newspaper industry, established their own news divisions to supplement the reports they acquired through the newspaper-dominated wire services.⁷

By the mid-1930s, the most impressive radio news division belonged not to Sarnoff’s NBC but its main rival, CBS. Owned by William S. Paley, the wealthy son of a cigar magnate, CBS was struggling to keep up with NBC, and Paley came to see news as an area where his young network might be able to gain an advantage. A brilliant, visionary businessman, Paley was fascinated by broadcasting and would soon steer CBS ahead of NBC, in part by luring away its biggest stars. His bold initiative to beef up its news division was equally important, giving CBS an identity that clearly distinguished it from its rivals. Under Paley, CBS would become the Tiffany network, the home of quality as well as crowd-pleasers, a brand that made it irresistible to advertisers.⁸

Paley hired two print journalists, Ed Klauber and Paul White, to run CBS’s news unit. Under their watch, the network increased the frequency of its news reports and launched news-and-commentary programs hosted by Lowell Thomas, H. V. Kaltenborn, and Robert Trout. In 1938, with Europe drifting toward war, CBS expanded these programs and began broadcasting its highly praised World News Roundup; its signature feature was live reports from correspondents stationed in London, Paris, Berlin, and other European capitals. These programs were well received and popular with listeners, prompting NBC and the other networks to follow Paley’s lead.

The outbreak of war sparked a massive increase in news programming on all the networks. It comprised an astonishing 20 percent of the networks’ schedules by 1944. Heightened public interest in news, particularly news about the war, was especially beneficial to CBS, where Klauber and White had built a talented stable of reporters. Led by Edward R. Murrow, they specialized in vivid on-the-spot reporting and developed an appealing style of broadcast journalism, affirming CBS’s leadership in news. By the end of the war, surveys conducted by the Office of Radio Research revealed that radio had become the main source of news for large numbers of Americans, and Murrow and other radio journalists were widely respected by the public. And though network news people knew that their audience and airtime would decrease now that the war was over, they were optimistic about the future and not very keen to jump into the new field of television.⁹

This is ironic, since it was television that was uppermost in the minds of network leaders like Sarnoff and Paley. The television industry had been poised for takeoff as early as 1939, when NBC, CBS, and DuMont, a growing network owned by an ambitious television manufacturer, established experimental stations in New York City and began limited broadcasting to the few thousand households