In his 84 years, William Paley has been hailed as a media pioneer, a business tycoon, a prominent art collector and bon vivant. He is one of America’s richest and most influential figures. He founded and moulded the CBS television network into the largest and, for many years, the most popular network in the USA. He also controls CBS Records, the largest record manufacturing company in the world, and CBS Publishing, one of America’s largest publishing companies.
“When people think of CBS, they don’t tend to consider those businesses, they always think of broadcasting,” Paley says. “Actually, I don’t mind that at all, because I think that’s the heart of the business – it is for me. The thing that interests me most is the business of broadcasting.”
For Paley it began in 1928, when he left his father’s cigar manufacturing company to buy a small struggling radio station in Philadelphia. In the next few years, he bought up several more, and in the early 1940s took $60 million from the profits of radio network and launched CBS Television. In 1946, there were 6,000 TV sets in the USA and CBS consisted of one station broadcasting between six and ten hours a week. Five years later, it had 62 affiliates across the country linked by coaxial cable, broadcasting to over 25,000 homes.
Paley looks back on the early days of television as the most exciting time of his life. “It was a very happy thing we were playing with. A lot of people felt that this was a passing fancy or a gimmick and it wouldn’t be around for very long. But those of us who saw in the new era of communications couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t realise how important it was going to become in time.”
“It took a long time to get into our stride until we had the kind of quality in our productions that Hollywood pictures had: good lighting, good costumes, wonderful sets. But we didn’t know much about them and we couldn’t afford to buy people from Hollywood, so we had to train people from scratch.”
However, the stars of radio did make the transition to TV to produce such classic programmes as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Burns and Allen Show starring George Burns and Gracie Allen, and television was now becoming a major force. The career of CBS journalist Edward Murrow, who became a television legend, and who used television to change the course of American history.
CBS, under Paley, was responsible for many innovations. As early as the early years, Paley goaded his technicians into stretching the known boundaries of broadcasting by linking up correspondents in five different European countries live to Americans on how those countries were faring during the war. The result was CBS Radio Roundup, a show so popular that a version of it is still on the air today.
Paley also masterminded the revolutionary concept of shifting control of programming from sponsors to the network itself, by selling shows to advertisers rather than vice versa. This was a big risk at first, because it meant that the network had to underwrite, without guarantees, all the programme costs. It became a different world after we finally gained control of all our time,” says Paley. “Now, except for very special cases, we produce all our own shows.”
And over the years many of these shows have been revolutionary too. It was CBS that put on the air TV’s very first pregnant woman, when Lucille Ball’s real-life pregnancy was written into her series I Love Lucy, which commanded the highest viewing figures ever of that time. All in the Family, the American version of Till Death Us Do Part, marked the first entertainment programme to deal in a taboo subject such as bigotry and racial prejudice. And 60 Minutes was the first documentary series in TV history to rise into the top ten most popular programmes, by some 32.5 million viewers every week.
One blow was the collapse of Paley’s beloved CBS Channel, an advertiser-supported cable channel, dedicated to quality programmes from all over the world. Despite a warm reception from critics and viewers, the station folded after two years with losses that Paley acknowledges were far higher than anticipated.
“I was defeated by lack of knowledge,” he says. “No one knew what our circulation was, and we couldn’t find out so we couldn’t tell the advertisers what they were getting for their money.”
Source: Broadcast 50 Years of Television: 1986