The Single Most Important Person in the History of Broadcasting: William S. Paley (2002)

• Report rights infringement
• published: 22 Nov 2015
• views: 2232

William S. Paley (September 28, 1901 – October 26, 1990) was the chief executive who built Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) from a small radio network into one of the foremost radio and television network operations in the United States. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312005911/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp;=1789&creative;=9325&creativeASIN;=0312005911&linkCode;=as2&tag;=tra0c7-20&linkId;=60c2d3e550a426996a2f6ce16b3fef72 Paley quickly grasped the earnings potential of radio and recognized that good programming was the key to selling advertising time and, in turn, bringing in profits to the network and to affiliate owners. Before Paley, most businessmen viewed stations as stand-alone local outlets or, in other words, as the broadcast equivalent of local newspapers. Individual stations originally bought programming from the network and, thus, were considered the network's clients. Paley changed broadcasting's business model not only by developing successful and lucrative broadcast programming but also by viewing the advertisers (sponsors) as the most significant element of the broadcasting equation. Paley provided network programming to affiliate stations at a nominal cost, thereby ensuring the widest possible distribution for both the programming and the advertising. The advertisers then became the network's primary clients and, because of the wider distribution brought by the growing network, Paley was able to charge more for the ad time. Affiliates were required to carry programming offered by the network for part of the broadcast day, receiving a portion of the network's fees from advertising revenue. At other times in the broadcast day, affiliates were free to offer local programming and sell advertising time locally. Paley's recognition of how to harness the potential reach of broadcasting was the key to his growing CBS from a tiny chain of stations into what was eventually one of the world's dominant communication empires. During his prime, Paley was described as having an uncanny sense for popular taste[4] and exploiting that insight to build the CBS network. As war clouds darkened over Europe in the late 1930s, Paley recognized Americans' desire for news coverage of the coming war and built the CBS news division into a dominant force just as he had previously built the network's entertainment division. During World War II, Paley served in the psychological warfare branch in the Office of War Information, under General Dwight Eisenhower, and held the rank of colonel. It was while based in London, England, during the war when Paley came to know and befriend Edward R. Murrow, CBS's head of European news. In 1946, Paley promoted Frank Stanton to president of CBS. CBS expanded into TV and rode the post-World War II boom to surpass NBC, which had dominated radio. CBS has owned the Columbia Record Company and its associated CBS Laboratories since 1939. In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the 33-1/3-rpm long-playing vinyl disc to successfully compete with RCA Victor's 45-rpm vinyl disc. Also, CBS Laboratories and Peter Goldmark developed a method for color television. After lobbying by RCA President David Sarnoff and Paley in Washington, D.C., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the RCA color system as the standard, and CBS sold the patents to its system to foreign broadcasters as PAL SECAM. CBS was the last of the three broadcast networks to adopt color television, having to buy and license RCA equipment and technology. PAL or Phase Alternating Line, an analogue TV-encoding system, is today a television-broadcasting standard used in large parts of the world. "Bill Paley erected two towers of power: one for entertainment and one for news," 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt claimed in his autobiography, Tell Me a Story. "And he decreed that there would be no bridge between them.... In short, Paley was the guy who put Frank Sinatra and Edward R. Murrow on the radio and 60 Minutes on television." The relationship between Paley and his news staff was not always smooth. His friendship with Ed Murrow, one of the leading lights in the CBS news division (and by then a vice president of CBS), suffered during the 1950s over the hard-hitting tone of the Murrow-hosted See It Now series. The implication was that the network's sponsors were uneasy about some of the controversial topics of the series, leading Paley to worry about lost revenue to the network as well as unwelcome scrutiny during the era of McCarthyism. In 1955, Alcoa withdrew its sponsorship of See It Now, and eventually the program's weekly broadcast on Tuesdays was stopped, though it continued as a series of special segments until 1958. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Paley