Word: fcc
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...less than four full-time stations," i.e., less than enough to allow CBS, NBC Red, NBC Blue and Mutual one outlet apiece. All 14 were NBC affiliates having the usual five-year contracts with NBC-contracts giving NBC an option on their best hours on 28 days' notice. FCC's new regulations modified this, requiring 56 days' notice. But FCC's regulations were not yet in force...
...broadcasting field. To Mutual it was restraint of trade, made possible by 1) the option system and 2) the fact that NBC, owning both Red and Blue networks, can recoup on the enormously lucrative Red any losses sustained in snapping up business for the Blue. To Mutual, FCC was a friend because it wanted to alter 1) and, by compelling NBC to sell the Blue, do away with 2). To NBC and CBS, FCC was an enemy because it wanted to go a great deal farther than that...
Messrs. Paley and Trammell had to think about these matters because it was plain to them that FCC's proposed regulations would not merely prevent such squeezes as Mutual complained was applied to it by NBC's Blue. The proposed rules were sweeping and revolutionary. They required that no station anywhere be linked by option-contract to one network alone. On the face of it, that would mean no NBC ... no CBS in their present advantageous forms...
Behind the stiff regulations the network men warily suspected a tough New Dealer's dislike of their urban glamor. They sensed a desire to break them down in favor of regional networks. And they thought they sensed something much more dangerous. If the stories they told were true, FCC's Chairman Fly wanted to reform not only their business methods but their programs...
...place of a determinable "circulation," they offer to advertisers time on a fixed number of stations they can be sure of. To remove that certainty, they say, would be like removing a publisher's certainty that he can deliver his magazine in certain cities. For FCC to threaten such action through its licensing power, they say, corresponds to an attack on the freedom of the press...