Word: nbc
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...demands for higher earnings will undoubtedly grow during the fall season unless ratings are on the upswing. By then, Fred Silverman, 41, NBC's $1 million-a-year president, will have had ample opportunity to work his programming magic, if he has any left. For Silverman, who made his reputation at CBS and ABC, the task is formidable. Past NBC programmers failed to foresee the impact that the post-World War II baby boom would have on the industry. When the network belatedly went after the youth market in 1974, it managed to alienate a goodly portion...
...NBC had been a prodigious profit cow for RCA in recent years, regularly furnishing about one-quarter of pretax earnings and in 1975 supplying 31%. But the milk was growing watery. By the end of 1978, NBC's pretax profit contribution dropped to 17.6%, less than two other RCA divisions. So Griffiths-"Bottom Line Ed," as he is known at RCA-went out and hired "the man with the golden gut," Fred Silverman...
...breakfast. Worse still, two weeks ago, the Nightly News briefly fell into third place in the ratings for the first time ever. The network partly attributed the drop to ABC's rejuvenated news operation. It also admitted that affiliate switches had hurt; in the past two years, NBC has lost ten major local stations to ABC, affecting the ratings for both news and entertainment shows. Nonetheless, there were some hopeful signs: the news budget is up 23% over last year, and Tom Snyder (host of the new magazine Prime Time) and Phil Donahue (with frequent appearances on Today) should...
...network did not have enough to fret about, NBC has been trying since November to clear up a scandal that had been winked at for years, according to some NBC insiders. Under investigation are expense-account fraud and the embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars by some NBC unit managers, who handle logistics for news, sports, and entertainment crews on location. So far 18 of the 55 unit managers, including their autocratic supervisor, Vice President Stephen Weston, have lost their jobs, and one has pleaded guilty to criminal charges...
...first jobs undertaken by Jane Cahill Pfeiffer when she arrived last fall as NBC's new chairman, Silverman's second in command, was to get to the bottom of the scandal. The former IBM vice president has also stepped on toes trying to straighten out the network's tangled management structure. Said one executive: "She has a Mother Superior complex." Chipped in another: "I understand that at IBM they don't fire people, they just reorganize in such a way as to drive someone out. That is exactly what is going on here...