CBS

This page covers the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) network, now part of the Viacom empire, described on a separate page of this profile.

     History

At its height the group encompassed radio and television broadcasting, book and music publishing, sound recordings, a sports team and a toy company.

It dates from the 1920s, when the Paley family invested profits from its La Palina cigar business in one of the first US commercial radio stations. As radio took off the group absorbed the independent Columbia Record company and Columbia film studio.

By the sixties (in retrospect the golden years of the three US networks) it embraced

• radio stations
• television stations
• television production
• film production
• record labels
• music recording studios
• record pressing plants and an international distribution operation
• music publishing
• the Columbia Record and Tape Club
• retailing operations (the Pacific Stereo and Discount Records chains)
• musical instrument manufacturing (Fender Guitars, Rhodes Pianos, and Rogers Drums)
• consumer electronics (hi-fi speakers, televisions)
• book publishing (Holt Rinehart Winston)
• magazine publishing
• sports (New York Yankees baseball team).
  

A chronology for CBS is here.

     Studies

William Paley stars in Sally Bedell Smith's breathless In All His Glory: The Legendary Tycoon & His Brilliant Circle (New York: Simon & Schuster 90) - enough said - and the less awe-struck Empire: William S Paley & The Making of CBS (New York: St Martins 87) by Lewis Paper. The Sisters: Babe Mortimer Paley, Betsey Roosevelt Whitney & Minnie Astor Fosburgh: The Life & Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters (New York: Random 92) by David Grafton offers another perspective. Paley's As It Happened: A Memoir (New York, Doubleday 79) is bland and ego-ridden.

David Halberstam's The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf 79) is a far more intelligent picture of the Washington Post, CBS, New York Times and LA Times at the peak of the 'television age'. 

Ken Auletta's Three Blind Mice: How The Television Networks Lost Their Way (New York: Random House 91) gives a picture of 'old media in crisis' as the businesses and consumers first started to head onto the information highway. It's deeper and more original than the disappointing collection of profiles in his The Highwaymen - Warriors of the Information Superhighway (New York: Random 97). The King of Cash: The Inside Story of Laurence Tisch (New York: Wiley 95) is a pedestrian account by Christopher Winans of CBS chair and cigarette mogul Tisch.

William Boddy's 'Building the World's Largest Advertising Medium: CBS and Television 1940-60' in Hollywood In The Age of Television (Boston: Unwin Hyman 90) edited by Tino Balio, Les Brown's Television: The Business Behind the Box (New York (Harcourt Brace 71) and Robert Metz's CBS: Reflections in a Bloodshot Eye (New York: NAL 75) are of value for the network's middle years. They're more incisive than Robert Slater's This ... is CBS (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall 88) or Peter Boyer's Who Killed CBS: The Undoing of America's Number One News Network (New York: Random 88). Overviews of the US networks and broadcasting are highlighted here.

For CBS News see Herbert Gans's sprightly Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (New York: Pantheon 79), Fred Friendly's Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (New York: Random 68), Bill Leonard's In The Storm of the Eye: A Lifetime at CBS (New York: Putnam 87), Peter McCabe's Bad News At Black Rock: The Sell-out Of CBS News (New York: Arbor House 87), Manes Sperber's Murrow: His Life & Times (New York: Freundlich 87) and Gary Gates's thinner Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News (New York: Harper & Row 78). Bernard Goldberg's Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News (New York: Regnery 01) struck us as a tendentious tract.

For Columbia Records see the separate Revolutions profile and Tim Brooks' Columbia Records in the 1890s: Founding the Record Industry (in the Association for Recorded Sound Journal of 1978), Norman Lebrecht's When The Music Stops (New York: Simon & Schuster 96), Fredric Dannen's Hit Men: Power Brokers & Fast Money Inside The Music Business (New York: Vintage 91), Tom King's David Geffen: A Biography Of New Hollywood (London: Hutchinson 00) and Jory Farr's overheated Moguls & Madmen: The Pursuit of Power in Popular Music (New York: Simon & Schuster 94).

Peter Goldmark's Maverick Inventor: My Turbulent Years at CBS (New York: Saturday Review Press 73) is a memoir by the under-appreciated wizard.




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