Word: broadcasting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Otherwise, the power of the network grew as the Depression lengthened and private stations died. CBS president William Paley hit on the idea of offering his network's participant stations free unsponsored programs in exchange for the right to broadcast sponsored network series at any time he wished. Paley could sell national advertising spots without clearance fears; although this led to the domination of a large part of the broadcasting schedule by powerful commercial interests, it also afforded a great opportunity for original programming in the unsponsored time zones--allowing the off-beat a coast-to-coast audience...
With KDKA setting an example, Secretary of Commerce Hoover was deluged by requests for broadcast licenses; what those licenses warranted was not yet considered. Hoover's responses effectively favored the companies able to afford powerful facilities. Stations owned by AT & T and RCA nudged smaller groups out of competition...
...stations, receiving the right to manufacture radio equipment on a limited basis, while RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse formed the NBC radio system, which operated two networks and dominated its field for years. By these actions, antitrust laws were circumvented; networks being new entities altogether, the danger of eventual broadcast monopoly was ignored...
...Federal Radio Commission administered over this congealing mess, and took steps towards upgrading broadcast material and goals. In 1928 it requested 164 stations to present a case for their continued existence. Unfortunately, pending cases produced massive political pressure by those Congressmen who made agreements with the defendants and those who made money from station advertising. Barnouw quotes a 1935 Harvard Business Review summary of the FRC's career: "...while talking in terms of the public interest, convenience and necessity the commission actually chose to further the ends of the commercial broadcasters." Thus was the status quo preserved. Long commercial breaks...
...Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Although ostensibly private organizations, they have received considerable financial and editorial aid from the CIA (which is, of course, "empowered to undertake unspecified activities abroad," and does). Radio Free Europe is manned by embittered anticommunist intellectuals from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, and broadcasts from Munich, but its handbook states that it "cannot take a line contrary to United States Government policy or to the beliefs of the United States and American institutions." Radio Liberty (formerly Radio Liberation) is designed to foment anti-Soviet aggression wherever socialist take-over beckons. Both Radio Free Europe...