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...taking away Jack Donaghy's microwave ovens. The cast of 30 Rock - a show about a fictional program on a very real TV network - will have to find a new target to make fun of, now that cable giant Comcast has finalized its bid on a majority stake in NBC Universal. If the plan gains final approval from government regulators, Comcast will have effectively bought a controlling 51% stake in the entertainment company from General Electric in a deal worth some $30 billion. As GE's vice president of East Coast television and microwave-oven-programming, Donaghy, played by Alec...
...NBC was the U.S.'s first major broadcast network, founded in New York City in 1926 by the Radio Corporation of America (a subsidiary of General Electric) as a ploy to sell radios. (Radios absent programming, after all, are rather worthless.) Dubbed the National Broadcast Company, it originally had two separate networks, both focused primarily on the East Coast: the Red Network, which broadcast entertainment and music, and the Blue Network, which carried news. In 1927 the West Coast got its own version of the Red and Blue with the creation of the Orange and Gold networks, which largely showed...
Almost from the start, however, legal troubles tangled NBC's corporate history. In 1931 antitrust issues forced RCA to split from General Electric; the orphaned company moved into new digs in New York City's Rockefeller Center (which remains its headquarters to this day). Despite a spirited rivalry with fellow broadcasting giant CBS in the golden age of radio, NBC ruled the dial - a supremacy that sparked further antitrust investigations from the newly created Federal Communications Commission. In 1939 the FCC ordered RCA to spin off NBC entirely; RCA, in a successful effort to avoid this outcome, instead sold...
Television would provide NBC with new realms to conquer. The company was an early adopter: it launched some of the first experimental transmissions from the antenna atop the Empire State Building in 1931, and it started regular broadcasts in New York City in 1939, debuting in time for the opening of the World's Fair. The company minted the first TV star in comedian Milton Berle, whose Texaco Star Theater became a hit in 1948 - the same year that the number of televisions in America crossed the 1 million mark. NBC started broadcasting in color in 1954; its famed peacock...
...attention-hungry Virginia socialites broke their silence on Tuesday, appearing on NBC's Today show, where they insisted that they had permission to attend the gala dinner. "We were invited, not crashers. There isn't anyone that would have the audacity or the poor behavior to do that," Michaele Salahi said, but the couple did not specify who had issued the invitation. On the same program, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs denied that claim, saying, "You don't show up at the White House as a misunderstanding." The Salahis exchanged e-mails about attending the state dinner with...