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Subject: "CBS Television: The First 50 Years": A Critique.

Here's my vies on last night's (Wednesday, May 21st) CBS special on the
 network's first 50 years.

It tried to squeeze-in a 100-minute (minus commercials) span a lot of clips.

There were some good ones.

But, there were some major omissions:

(1) While they briefly mentioned that CBS had begun in 1927 as a radio network,
 Bill Paley was NOT the founder. He DID buy a financially-struggling CBS
 radio network in 1928 and within a year, had it making a profit. The
 original owners of CBS were (I'm running off memory based on reading
 some books on broadcasting history) Arthur Judson (a concert impersarrio),
 Major White (I don't klnow his first name, but he was well-known as a
 pioneer broadcaster), Leon and Ike Levy (two brothers who owned WCAU radio
 in Philadelphia) and some man named Coates. They started-up something
 called United Independent Broadcasters, after Judson's proposal to
 provide the programming (for a feww) to the NBC Red and Blue Networks
 was shot down by David Sarnoff. Judson was so angry that he decided to
 form his own network!

UIB did get some fionancing from Columbia Records, hence, the name Columbia
 Broadcasting System. But a few months after going on the air, Columbia
 records unloaded it's share of CBS (a decade later, a much stronger CBS
 would acquire Columbia records), and the remaining owners scratched for
 funds. 

After several other investors came and went, William Paley was suckered into
 buying CBS in the summer of 1928, just short of the network's first
 birthday. Within a year, CBS had turned the corner, and was on it's way.
 Watching last night's show, you would think Mr. Paley organized CBS radio
 in 1927. Wrong.

(2) Except for Super Bowl I (clips from NFL films, supposedely, CBS' own
 archive tape of the game got misplaced and no longer exists), which was
 also carried on NBC, there was no mention of sports. No footage of Bobby
 Orr's Stanley-Cup winning goal, nothing of Joe Montana's dramatic NFC-
 winning touchdown pass to Dwight Clark, no footage from the 1960 Olympics
 (the first covered on American television), no footage of Tiger Woods
 winning the 1997 Masters nor of Tara Lipnski's recent Olympic fugure-
 skating gold medal. All of these sports moments aired on CBS.

(3) No mention (except of three seconds of Art Linkletter and the opening
 title of Garry Moore) of daytime programming.

(4) No mention of game shows--both the graet ("What's My Line?") and in-
 famous ("The $ 64,000 Question").

(5) Only the title--no clips--of a show whose host was personally respon-
 sible for 12% of total CBS television network revenue at one point during
 the middle 1950's--Arthur Godfrey.

Perhaps this show should have been three hours. If it had been, then many
 of the above omissions could have been corrected.

There were some nice touches:

(1) At a couple of points, they revealed the original CBS television network
 logo (before the "Eye" was introduced)---three plain block letters "C B S".

(2) The beginning of a very early Douglas Edwards newscast. The newscast was
 titled "CBS Television News", meaning it must have aired between 1948 and
 1950. From what I've been able to gather, the newscast was retitled
 "Douglas Edwards and the News" in the fall of 1950, then, in September
 1960, "The CBS Evening News with Douglas Edwards"). I only wish they had
 let a few more seconds of it run so we could have heard what was that day's
 top story--and perhaps a chyron super to identify the date of this clip.

(3) And at the very end of the show, the final "Good Night" was given--not
 as a clip from the past--by Walter Cronkite: "And That's The Wauy It Is--
 The First 50 Years of the CBS Television Network, May 21st, 1998. This
 is Walter Cronkite, CBS News........Good Night".

Casual viewers may have found it entertaining. But I found it lacking in
 a few points. Except for ignorging the REAL beginnings of CBS, perhaps
 the other omissions mentioned above may all have been due to time
 constraints. (I recall that to celebrate the 50th anniversary of CBS in
 radio and their 30th anniversary in television, the network did a rather
 --pardon the pun--extensive retrospective that ran eight hours over seven
 nights during 1978. To be truthful, I wish CBS had done an updated version
 of that this time around)

Joseph Gallant

<notquite@hotmail.com>

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