NBC

In the early 1980s three networks - ABC, CBS and NBC - accounted for around 92% of US television viewers. AT&T ('Ma Bell') controlled 78% of local telephone service and around 98% of the long distance market. IBM accounted for 77% of the computer market. How the would has changed, and not just because of the web.

     history

NBC was formed by Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1926 after parent General Electric (GE) decided that it could maximise profits by producing the content, the broadcasts, the transmitters and the receivers. Sounds like Microsoft circa 1998. GE was forced to divest RCA (and thus NBC) in 1932. ABC, RCA's 'second network', was spun off a few years later. NBC started US commercial television broadcasts in 1941. In 1986 RCA - by then a struggling conglomerate - was swallowed by GE.

A chronology of the network is here.

An indication of the NBC wing of GE, as of May 2001, is here.

     Studies

Overviews of the US networks and broadcasting are highlighted here.

NBC, for several generations the leading US radio and television broadcaster, reflected the vision of RCA executive David Sarnoff - a strange mix of technocrat, tireless self-promoter and cash register. Kenneth Bilby's The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry (New York, Columbia Uni Press 91) offers an introduction to Sarnoff's life and times. 

It's more nuanced than Eugene Lyons' David Sarnoff (New York, Harper & Row 66) and Carl Dreher's Sarnoff: An American Success (New York, Quadrangle 77). Tom Lewis' Empire of the Air (New York, Harper Collins 91) offers a wider picture.

David Halberstam's The Powers That Be (New York, Knopf 79) is an intelligent picture of the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, 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 House 97).

For a view of life in front of the camera Gwenda Blair's breathless Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch & The Selling of Television News (New York, Simon & Schuster 88), Robert Goldberg's Anchors: Brokaw, Jennings & the Evening News (New York, Carol 90) and Herbert Gans's sprightly Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time (New York, Pantheon 79)

Program executive Brandon Tartikoff's The Last Great Ride: NBC Television (New York, 92) is self-celebratory but provides a view from inside the belly of the beast. Grant Tinker's Tinker In Television: From General Sarnoff To General Electric (New York, Simon & Schuster 94) is less pacy, in contrast to Pat Weaver's The Best Seat in the House: The Golden Years of Radio and Television (New York, Knopf 94).

Benjamin Aldridge's The Victor Talking Machine Co (New York 64) offers a view of RCA's roots. Margaret Graham's RCA & the Videodisc (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 86) considers why RCA dropped the ball, influencing Sony's decision to create both content and hardware. There's a similar account in Homer Oldfield's King of the Seven Dwarfs: General Electric's Ambiguous Challenge to the Computer Industry (Los Alamitos, IEEE Computer Society Press 96), the major study of the failure of GE and other consumer giants to achieve success as computing hardware/software manufacturers.

There's been no comprehensive history of General Electric. For its significance in technological development see Bernard Carlson's Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson & the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 91), Leonard Reich's The Making of American Industrial Research: Science & Business at GE and Bell, 1876-1926 (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 85) and George Wise' Willis R. Whitney: General Electric & the Origins of US Industrial Research (New York, Columbia Uni Press 85).

Ronald Kline's Steinmetz: Engineer & Socialist (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni Press 92) is an account of the leading technocrat. For 'Neutron Jack' Welch see Welch: An American Icon (New York, Wiley 01) by Janet Lowe and Jack: Straight From the Gut (New York, Warner 01) by Jack Welch & John Byrne - boys with very large toys. There's a less ebullient account in Thomas O'Boyle's At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric & the Pursuit of Profit (New York, Random 01)

David Nye's Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, MIT Press 85) is exemplary.



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