Word: nbc
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...issue comes to public conflict it is customarily fought out in the wrong terms: an attempt to link one specific act of real-life violence to one specific act of TV violence. About the best documented instance, from the viewpoint of anti-TV forces, occurred in 1966 when NBC screened Doomsday Flight, ignoring pleas by airline pilots not to do so. A made-for-TV special, it presented a fictional extortion attempt by bomb threat against an airliner in flight. After the show the Federal Aviation Agency recorded a dramatic increase in phone-in bomb threats to airlines. More horrifying...
...known variously as "the Ayatullah," "St. Jane" and "Attila the Nun," a reference to the six months she once spent in a Berkeley, Calif., convent. As those sour nicknames show, the rise of Jane Cahill Pfeiffer, 46, chairman of NBC, has produced a predictable mix of envy, admiration, fear and resentment, laced with a dollop of old-fashioned male chauvinism...
...from President Carter, who wanted to make her Secretary of Commerce. Her reasons: she needed time to recuperate from a thyroid cancer operation, and she was reluctant to spend so much time away from her husband. Pfeiffer then worked as a top-drawer consultant to several major companies, including NBC. Last fall, in a surprise move, she became the $225,000-a-year (plus up to $200,000 a year in bonuses) chairman of NBC, responsible to the network's new president, Fred Silverman...
Much of the current gallows humor at NBC eddies around the relationship of Silverman and Pfeiffer, a.k.a. "the Odd Couple" and "Mr. Tough and Mrs. Clean." By most standards, the two top executives are indeed mismatched. Silverman is rumpled and raffish, a volatile high roller, known for his seat-of-the-pants decisions on programming. Pfeiffer is formal and controlled, a superb administrator, known for her idealism and belief in "high programming standards." Where Silverman's language is direct and often unprintable, Pfeiffer's fluctuates between girls' school ("Oh gosh, gee whiz") and "high...
...right away. She's a nun." Says another source: "I have the feeling that she thinks television is a dirty business, period, and she has to save us from ourselves by cleaning house." Another opinion is that her IBM training will be of limited use at NBC. Says a former executive at a TV production company: "Jane Pfeiffer is a virgin who comes out of the structured school. I'm not sure the structured school works in the entertainment business...