LAWRENCE ROGERS JR. WATCHED HIS FELLOW TV STATION MANAGERS stagger out of their shuttle buses. Several of them were feeling the effects of the previous night’s festivities at the Waldorf Astoria bar, their hangovers now pounding in their heads with extra force following the two-hour bus ride to the middle of New Jersey.
Like the rest of the group, Rogers managed a local TV station that operated as an NBC affiliate. He looked forward to this trip every year, when NBC invited the station managers to New York for three days of high living at the Waldorf. In previous years, their second day had begun with a more hangover-friendly schedule: a short stroll from the Waldorf to NBC headquarters at Rockefeller Center for a 10 A.M. presentation by the network brass. This year promised something different. Just before leaving for New York, Rogers had received a letter from the NBC affiliates’ volunteer leader, breaking the good news: “The General himself will meet with us.”
While Rockefeller Center and Radio City served as the public face of RCA’s power, the heart of David Sarnoff’s empire could be found here, in rural New Jersey. RCA Laboratories had been founded in the run-up to World War II, and ever since then, the sprawling complex of low-slung buildings had been expanding into the adjacent farmland. Military contracts to build or research all manner of electronics—solar panels, radar jammers, transistors, and much more—fueled the rapid growth. The David Sarnoff Laboratories (as the complex had been renamed in 1951) was in essence a smaller version of AT&T’s famed Bell Laboratories, where RCA’s larger rival used a slice of its monopoly profits to fund all manner of pure and applied research.
Bud Rogers knew the area well from his days as a student at nearby Princeton University, an Ivy League pedigree that made him stand out from most of his seventy colleagues milling about the Sarnoff Labs parking lot. The other TV-station managers represented a cross section of American good ol’ boys. Station managers such as Johnny Outler of Atlanta’s WSB-TV and Howard Pill of Montgomery, Alabama’s WSFA represented the classic southern variety. Ed Yocum of Montana’s KGHL and Ewing Kelly of Sacramento’s KCRA were similarly gregarious backslappers, minus the drawl. Not everyone fit the mold. Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had come to represent the paper’s television station. He stood in the parking lot, looking somewhat out of place.
Bud Rogers enjoyed hopping between these different worlds. After graduating from Princeton, he served as an artillery officer during the war, then moved to Huntington, West Virginia, to take a job at his new father-in-law’s local radio station. (Like Joseph Pulitzer and many other longtime newspaper publishers, Colonel Joseph Harvey Long had wound up in the radio business shortly after the Federal Radio Commission started giving away licenses.) Introducing himself to the radio station’s advertisers, who were spread out across central Appalachia, Rogers could be Bud from Huntington, West Virginia, a fella with a hillbilly name from a hillbilly town in a hillbilly state. Checking in to the Waldorf, he morphed into Lawrence H. Rogers Jr., scion of a well-to-do family, former army officer and Princeton man.
Rogers and his fellow station managers were well aware of the debt their booming new industry owed to David Sarnoff. Over the past quarter century, Sarnoff had poured $50 million of RCA’s money into television research, doggedly ignoring others’ doubts about TV’s commercial potential. That investment was now paying off. RCA built more TV sets than any other manufacturer and the special wires Sarnoff had insisted on installing in NBC’s studios two decades earlier during the depths of the Depression now served their preordained purpose, moving television shows around 30 Rock. These days nobody mocked David Sarnoff for being a “televisionary,” that insult having matured into a compliment.
Rogers’s main complaint about General Sarnoff—a gripe shared by his fellow affiliates—was the General’s habit of focusing on technology at the expense of entertainment. Sarnoff’s loyalty lay with RCA, the laboratories that created new technology and the manufacturing plants that built it, not with NBC, which produced TV programs he had no interest in watching. He clearly appreciated the power that entertainment had over audiences, but General Sarnoff could never stomach the idea of a television star like Jackie Gleason earning more than a star research engineer working here in New Jersey, a comparison he often made whenever an NBC executive appealed to him for higher salaries to attract bigger stars.
The issue of Sarnoff’s disregard for popular culture had come to a head recently at Rogers’s West Virginia TV station, WSAZ. On Monday nights, NBC aired a long-running program devoted to classical music and opera while CBS broadcast a new situation comedy. To Rogers’s mind, the contrast between “The Voice of Firestone” on NBC and “I Love Lucy” on CBS summed up Sarnoff’s weakness as an entertainment executive. Lucille Ball’s antics now attracted ten times the number of viewers as the NBC show—and still the General refused to cancel his high-minded but low-rated competitor. He also ordered NBC not to copy the CBS strategy for attracting TV’s new stars. (To win the rights to I Love Lucy, longtime Sarnoff rival Bill Paley had sold a majority ownership stake in the show to a company the comedienne owned, greatly increasing her effective pay rate by letting her avoid postwar personal-income-tax rates that topped out near 80 percent.) To General Sarnoff , it made more sense to go hire a different actor, since to him comedians were interchangeable.
At today’s meeting at the David Sarnoff Laboratories, the NBC affiliates would get the opportunity to air their complaints about NBC’s programming. An article in the current issue of Broadcasting noted that the station managers were pleased that for the first time in recent years they would dealing directly with the top decision maker, “one who can give on-the-spot answers which, it has been their complaint in the past . . . had to be qualified and delayed while network officials consulted with top management of the parent RCA.”
RCA aides ushered Rogers and his fellow affiliates inside, then directed them to a small auditorium. An array of the very latest in television technology, including several large color sets, sat onstage. Bud Rogers took a seat in the third row, watching as David Sarnoff walked onto the stage. The General was grayer now, at sixty-two, and missing his usual cigar, Rogers noticed. Otherwise, David Sarnoff appeared to be his old self.
The General exuded an aura of power, which people tended to notice even more than his elegance and wealth. “All 5 feet 5 inches of his bullnecked, bull-chested figure bristles with authority and assurance,” Time magazine observed in its recent cover story on Sarnoff. “His chill blue eyes shine with impatient energy, his boyish, scrubbed-pink face radiates cockiness.”
And yet, for all the evidence the morning’s events seemed to offer of David Sarnoff’s power over the new television industry, Bud Rogers knew better. His five years in the business had taught him that many things in the television industry were not what they appeared to be.
IT WAS HARD to believe that it had been only five years since Bud Rogers saw his first television set. Drinking scotch one night in a hotel bar, the radio ad salesman had been amazed to see Milton Berle’s pie-covered face materialize before him on a small, black-and-white screen. Though Rogers had been reading about sending moving pictures through the air for years, he still couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. At that very moment, in NBC’s studios at Rockefeller Center, five hundred miles away in New York City, pie was dripping off Berle’s rubbery mug. Meanwhile, Rogers’s fellow barflies were laughing along as if they were sitting in the studio audience.
It was a moment that Bud Rogers would point to for the rest of his life as the instant he decided to get into business with David Sarnoff: “I didn’t see Milton Berle anymore. I didn’t see anyone. I merely saw, in an instant flash of crystal clarity, where I would be going to spend the rest of my career—all my productive life. For the first time in my life, I was unqualifiedly certain at that moment that I knew what was going to happen.”
Soon after his night in the bar, Rogers made his first trip to Rockefeller Center, asking rookie questions about how he might get into the television business. Only a handful of companies sold the equipment needed to operate a local television station—a transmitter, a large antenna, and TV cameras to film local news and events—with RCA dominating the field.
The real trick, Rogers learned, was not getting his hands on TV equipment but on a TV license, which would grant him the legal right to broadcast on a specified band of airwaves. Until he caught the TV bug, Rogers had paid little attention to the federal law governing the radio and television business (the Communications Act of 1934) nor to the agency it created to regulate the growing industry (the Federal Communications Commission). After speaking with a few Washington lawyers who specialized in representing clients before the FCC, he began to pay closer attention.
According to the law, the process should be simple and straightforward. Ever since Herbert Hoover ushered the 1927 Radio Act into law, the basic principle supported by Hoover and Senator Clarence Dill had governed the nation’s airwaves. (The Communications Act of 1934 replaced the 1927 radio law but retained its core provisions.) In theory, any citizen could apply to get a radio-station or TV-station license at no cost, just by asking. Above all, the law made clear, a license to broadcast electromagnetic waves of a particular length, which in essence is all a radio- or TV-station license is, was not to be considered private property. Instead, the government would lend out the licenses at no charge, and if multiple applicants wanted the same license, the FCC would judge who should get the first turn by assessing which licensee would better serve the public’s needs.
Learning about license law gave Rogers his first lesson in the difference between the way people pretended the television industry worked and the way it actually did. Secretary Hoover, Senator Dill, and the other drafters of the law had failed to anticipate how their system of kindergarten-style turn taking would work in the real world. The cost of building a radio or TV station was nearly impossible to justify if the station could be run for only a single year, an economic reality overlooked by the law. As a result, the Communications Commission invariably ruled in the years that followed that the licensee currently running the station was also the best positioned to serve the public interest during the next license period. “Renewal expectancy,” as it came to be known, effectively gutted what Hoover and Dill had been certain would be a key protection against license holder’s gaining too much power.
Meanwhile, the FCC continued to pay lip service to the notion that station owners did not own the airwaves, even as it worked to slowly transform those licenses into what increasingly looked like legal title to a property—the right to exclusive use of those airwaves in perpetuity.
What most interested Bud Rogers was a simple question: Who ended up winning the original license grant? The law instructed the FCC to evaluate applicants based on “the public interest, convenience or necessity,” a broad mandate that effectively gave the FCC the ability to pick whomever it liked for whatever reason it chose. The commission’s one consistent criterion for license applicants, Rogers’s lawyer told him, was proof of adequate financial resources to actually construct a television station. Beyond that, the criteria it used to select winners were opaque. On several occasions, the commission cited one reason for handing out a license (such as the winning applicant’s extensive ties to the local community), then used the exact same reason to justify making the opposite decision a few months later.
Rogers also learned the story of how the FCC had designed the American television dial, an effort that had been part of the same postwar airwave allocation process that crippled the FM industry. Chairman Porter and his allies originally designed a TV dial with just thirteen channels. (The FCC decided to take away channel 1 shortly thereafter and reassign those airwaves to users of mobile radios, leaving TV dials in the United States numbered from channel 2 to channel 13.) Still, Porter promised, even twelve channels would be enough to create a total of 405 local TV stations across the country, and up to seven channels in big cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Critics, Edwin Armstrong among them, scoffed at the FCC’s TV plan from the start. In a country as large as the United States, 405 stations would not be enough to provide competition in many cities or to reach rural areas of the country. Worse still, Armstrong and his allies warned, the interference problems that the FCC had been so obsessed with in the FM radio fight actually did exist in its new TV band and would make it impossible to create even 405 stations. Sure enough, neighboring television channels soon began ruining each other’s pictures. Signals from channel 4 in Detroit flew across Lake Erie, causing black slats to appear across the images being broadcast by channel 5 in Cleveland. By the time Bud Rogers got interested in trying to win a television license in 1948, the FCC had already run out of new licenses that wouldn’t interfere with the 100 stations it had already approved— a quarter of its promised allotment of licenses.
As Rogers began to figure out the peculiarities of the FCC’s plan, he realized that he was in luck. His home in Huntington, West Virginia, was in one of the few regions in the country where the television airwaves had not been given away already. Skeptics cautioned the TV-obsessed salesman to temper his enthusiasm, pointing out several obvious reasons nobody had bothered to apply for a TV license already. Huntington’s population totaled all of eighty thousand people, and the surrounding region in Central Appalachia was infamously impoverished. Many people didn’t even have electricity in their homes, let alone the means to afford a television. Furthermore, Rogers learned, television signals travel poorly in mountainous country, making building a TV station in the Mountain State, as West Virginia was nicknamed, even more ill-advised.
Rogers plowed ahead anyway, confident that he knew several things about his home that the TV folks in New York didn’t. Huntington, West Virginia, sits on the far western end of the state, smack in the middle of the giant Allegheny Plateau. That part of the Mountain State is not mountainous at all, and the giant plateau also extended across much of southern Ohio and eastern Kentucky. Studying topographic maps convinced Rogers that his idea could work. A TV signal broadcast from Huntington would reach far beyond the city limits to cover large parts of all three states, providing a far bigger market for viewers and for the sponsors who would want to reach them. Rogers figured this remarkable opportunity existed precisely because it seemed like such a dumb idea at first. With the help of his Washington lawyer, he applied for a television license and soon found himself in possession of a construction permit to build West Virginia’s only TV station, WSAZ.
Even with that victory, many self-proclaimed experts continued to warn Rogers against wasting money on the station. On one visit to New York to shop for equipment, he met with one of television’s best-known technical minds, who laid out the reasons why the new venture was doomed to fail.
Allen DuMont, a television pioneer who had made his fortune designing high-quality TV sets in the 1930s, told Rogers that the engineering incompetence that underpinned the FCC’s channel allocation scheme was so appalling that, in order for the infant television industry to thrive, the current system would have to be junked. Twelve VHF channels could never offer more than one or two TV stations in most U.S. cities, he said, and no coverage at all for much of rural America.
The limited number of television channels had hit DuMont’s television network especially hard, effectively leaving room for NBC and CBS to become the country’s two television networks. Unless a city had more than three stations, no local broadcaster would choose to affiliate with DuMont’s network, which could only afford to produce only low-budget dreck like “Captain Video and his Video Rangers.” (That show revolved around characters in outer space who spent much of their time watching old westerns, an awkward plot device meant to keep production costs down.) The other second-tier TV network, the American Broadcasting Company, found itself in similar straits.
DuMont, the sort of play-it-safe type who wore both a belt and suspenders (“a habit that is popularly, and in his case rightly, regarded as an infallible index to character,” noted a New Yorker profile of the engineer), sat Bud Rogers down and delivered a stern warning. Competing technologies offered obviously superior alternatives to the current setup. One technology, backed by Westinghouse, could deliver a dozen channels to virtually every American home by using decommissioned bombers from the war to create a sort of 1940s-version of satellite TV. Signals were sent up to the plane, which then broadcast them across a far greater area than any land-bound antenna could reach. During the 1948 Republican National Convention, a single plane used the “Stratovision” technology to broadcast the event across nine states.
DuMont told Rogers that even if the FCC ended up rejecting Stratovision, it would still be forced to relocate the TV dial just as it had relocated the FM radio dial. The Communications Act charged the FCC with maximizing the use of the airwaves, so sooner or later the commission would have to shift the TV band, allocating a larger slice of airwaves that would allow for more competition and, in the process, making early TVs and TV stations obsolete. Did Rogers really want to follow in the footsteps of the FM pioneers who built stations designed to use wavelengths the FCC took back overnight?
SHORTLY AFTER ROGERS DECIDED to ignore DuMont’s advice to give up on the TV business, the first part of the engineer’s prediction came true. The FCC officially rescinded Chairman Porter’s 1945 plan for TV, admitting that it would never provide adequate numbers of channels in American homes. The original decision to shoehorn TV into twelve interference-prone channels had relied on faulty engineering, just as Dumont, Armstrong, and countless other engineers had warned the agency. The FCC announced that it would stop authorizing any new TV channels and work on a new plan that would solve its old plan’s mistakes.
In Huntington, West Virginia, Rogers could hardly believe his luck. For all that Allen DuMont understood about television technology, it was clear the engineer understood nothing about the television business. “Exactly 108 TV stations or authorizations were in existence, and they were all faced with the prospect of government protection for an indefinite number of years of monopoly—or near-monopoly—operation. For anyone with eyes in his head to see with and half a brain to think with, this would be the equivalent of turning the children loose in a candy factory!”
Rogers’s station, WSAZ, hit the air on November 15, 1949, the sixty-fourth station to begin broadcasting in the United States. Like most local TV stations, it filled its time slots in two ways, with its own live programming (such as local news and sports) and by affiliating with a national network in order to broadcast it. For a station with a monopoly in its region, as Rogers’s had, the choice came down to the Big Two, NBC and CBS, since the two smaller networks, DuMont and ABC, couldn’t afford to produce a similar slate of high-quality shows. For Rogers, the decision was easy. CBS’s head of station relations treated Rogers with barely concealed disdain, clearly unconvinced that the hick from West Virginia could ever build a worthwhile TV station. At Rockefeller Center, on the other hand, after giving Rogers a private tour of Radio City, an NBC executive presented him with a ready-made affiliation contract that Rogers’ immediately signed.
The affiliation deal was a standard network contract, but Rogers could hardly believe the generosity of its terms. The contract reflected the peculiar balance of power that had transferred over to TV from the radio industry. While NBC and CBS called themselves “networks,” the name didn’t actually fit. Getting a TV show such as “The Milton Berle Show” delivered to a TV set in rural West Virginia took the cooperation of three rival interests. First, the “network” created the shows in New York. Next, it handed them off to AT&T, which owned a nationwide cable network capable of moving images and sounds between cities. Once the program arrived at the local television station, that affiliate would broadcast it over the air to nearby homes. The setup recreated the exact structure of the AM radio industry, where Sarnoff had been fighting with AT&T and the local station owners over how to divvy up the market ever since Rogers was a toddler.
The local television stations had been eager to mimic the radio industry’s economic structure, for obvious reasons. In 1939, the FCC had shifted the industry’s balance of power in favor of the local stations, outlawing most of the standard network-affiliate contract provisions that worked in the radio networks’ favor. NBC fought the rules all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing the FCC’s rationale—a desire to counteract the alleged monopoly power of the networks—was inappropriate for an agency that Congress never intended to make an adjunct enforcer of the nation’s antitrust laws. In 1943, the Supreme Court sided with the commission, Justice Felix Frankfurter ruling that Congress had given the FCC wide discretion to protect the public interest, so if the commission felt it wise to issue rules aimed at restricting monopoly power, it could do so.
To traditional anti-trust experts, the FCC’s rules were puzzling. In 1943, the year the Supreme Court allowed the rules to go into effect, the networks earned a pretax profit of $19 million compared to $47 million for the local stations—a situation that didn’t seem to cry out for government intervention on the stations’ behalf. Sure enough, the new pro-affiliate rules soon made it impossible for the radio networks to make any profit at all. A decade later, despite the introduction of TV, the local AM radio stations, continued to make solid profits, earning $45 million on $377 million in revenue in 1953. (The FM radio industry, meanwhile, had been effectively crushed by the FCC’s regulations, taking in a paltry $2.3 million in revenue in 1953 and racking up losses so large that the FCC declined to release them.)
In the new television industry, the FCC’s pro-affiliate rules combined with the scarcity of local stations to make the power imbalance between the networks and their affiliates even more extreme. Local television stations’ profits shot up from nothing in 1950 to $50 million in 1953—and were rising fast. According to the FCC, the networks had gone from a $10 million loss to an $18 million profit in the same period, though Rogers knew that commonly cited number was extremely misleading. In fact, all the TV networks lost money, an embarrassing fact they covered up with the gusher of profits from their share in the local broadcasters’ cartel. FCC rules allowed each network to own up to five local stations, and unsurprisingly the networks had picked the most profitable affiliates in the country’s largest cities: WNBC in New York, KCBS in Los Angeles, and WABC in New York.
Most people never saw past the cultural power and giant revenues of the national networks, but Bud Rogers understood where the real economic power lay. “The forty-odd single-station market owners were in a position to demand literally anything they chose in the way of tribute from the networks and the advertising agencies who were trying to get their programs or their products exposed on TV,” he wrote in his memoir. It helped that the FCC’s “temporary” freeze dragged on for four years, from 1948 to 1952, allowing Bud Rogers, Johnny Outler, and the other members of the lucky 108 club to consolidate their hold on the markets they monopolized.
IN 1952, when the FCC finally announced plans to unveil its long-simmering plan to inject competition into the television industry, Rogers and his fellow broadcasters worried that their years of fat monopoly profits had come to an end. And indeed, to judge from the FCC’s press release announcing its decision, the commission’s plan would soon do just that. Since the regulators could find room for only a few more stations in the existing “Very High Frequency” band (which used airwaves over 1.4 meters long) it announced a plan to open up a vast number of channels in the shorter waves of the “Ultra High Frequency” band (which consisted of waves as short as 38 centimeters). Beginning in 1953, American TVs would go from having a dial limited to twelve VHF channels to a dial that also included another sixty-eight UHF channels. It had taken a while to work out a long-term fix to the market, the FCC commissioners said in announcing their UHF plan, but the new stations would finally unleash vigorous competition and solve the industry’s problems once and for all.
The decision left VHF station owners ecstatic. Having spent the past four years getting to know how the TV airwaves worked in the real world, Rogers immediately understood that the picture being painted by the Communications Commission was a mirage.
The vital importance of a station’s wavelength could be seen in the furious response of Bud Rogers to the FCC’s plan to shift WSAZ from channel 5 to channel 8. (Though the FCC’s 1952 plan focused on new UHF stations, it also created room for a handful of new VHF stations by moving around existing license holders.) The lower the channel number, the longer the airwaves it was allowed to use for its television broadcast, and longer waves were vastly superior at carrying TV signals over long distances. Channel 5, WSAZ’s original assignment, used waves just shy of 4 meters long. Channel 8 used waves just 1.5 meters long. To maintain his existing coverage area, Rogers calculated, he would have to more than triple his power. Even if the FCC let him boost his power that much, he would still wind up with higher electric bills and lower picture quality across much of his territory. Even worse, he realized, the new station the FCC had slated for the state capital on channel 3 would have vastly better reach in his territory, thanks to its 5-meter waves: “Any nitwit could see that Charleston’s channel 3 would dominate the whole area.”
Rogers took his Washington attorney, Bernie Koteen, to see the FCC’s general counsel. Like many communications lawyers in D.C., Koteen was a former FCC staff member himself, and the current general counsel, Henry Geller, was one of his former employees. Rogers, desperate to avoid being moved from channel 5 to 8, delicately dropped the phrase “injunctive relief” early in the conversation, warning the FCC lawyer that the switch would not take place without a long legal war. It would be easier to move WSAZ to channel 3, he suggested, and give the shorter waves to the new station in Charleston. By the end of the meeting the FCC lawyer had signed a letter allowing Rogers to do just that. In short order WSAZ vastly expanded its coverage area, including the entire city of Charleston.
Rogers’s bitter fight to avoid being moved from channel 5 to channel 8 captured the absurdity of the FCC’s plan to create viable competitors using the much shorter UHF waves assigned to channels 14 and up. Given the FCC’s new rule, UHF stations would be lucky to reach enough viewers to stay in business, let alone make a profit. To Bud Rogers and his fellow station owners, this part of the regulators’ plan was perfect. The local station owners had spent years worrying about the coming onslaught of new competitors that would follow the end of the long FCC license freeze. Instead, they now faced the only thing monopolists like more than a lack of competition—the illusion of competition.
As a final favor to the VHF stations, the commission’s UHF decision also quietly authorized them to vastly increase their coverage areas by boosting their maximum allowable power from five to fifty kilowatts. Regulators also tripled the maximum height allowed for a broadcast antenna, to one thousand feet, magnifying the effect. Those rules promised to let the lucky 108 stations greatly expand the reach of their signals and widen the already yawning gap between themselves and any newcomers.
DAVID SARNOFF OPENED his speech to Bud Rogers and the other NBC affiliates by recounting his early years in the wireless industry, starting with his days at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. The General had received a list of pointed questions from the affiliates ahead of time, covering their complaints over NBC’s paltry daytime programming and a laundry list of other gripes. His talk touched on those challenges but focused on the need to prepare for the future that his researchers and engineers were now creating. The General followed no script, and for several hours Rogers never saw him refer to any outline or notes. Yet to Rogers’s amazement the General never repeated himself, lost his place, or used an ungrammatical phrase.
“Of all the virtuoso performances I have ever witnessed in my life, this was the most outstanding,” Rogers said after the speech. “For pure oratorical dynamism it has never been surpassed.”
“He went through the vivid history of how all of us in that room had gotten there—mostly through following up on his own innovations over the past thirty years. And then he got to what was coming: Color TV.
“The General painted a word picture of the conversion of the entire TV spectrum to full color, and within a reasonably short span of years. To that end he pledged that, starting immediately, the NBC network would begin sending out some of its programs in “compatible color,” so as to not interrupt or interfere with the reception of any existing regular programs. There would be massive promotion, and many of the new programs had been designed with color in mind. And, finally, there would be a crash program to get color TV receivers to the marketplace in time for the next Christmas selling season.
“Everyone in the room was going to be given the opportunity to sign up as a member of the world’s first color-TV network before the day was over.
“There was much more to this presentation. And, of course, the audience lapped it all up like kittens and warm milk. When, finally, this marathon ad lib sales pitch came to an end, it was to a standing ovation including whistles and cheers that lasted for a full five minutes.”
As the applause died away, Rogers heard the familiar Georgia drawl of Johnny Outler, who ran WSB in Atlanta: “‘Call in the dawgs! Piss on the fire! The huntin’s all over!’”
With that, Outler, Rogers, and the rest of the local broadcasters headed back to the buses for another night of partying at the Waldorf Astoria.
TWO YEARS AFTER Sarnoff’s color-television presentation, as the glaring lack of competition in the television industry sparked calls in Washington for the FCC to correct its mistakes and to find an effective way to allow new stations on the air, Rogers and his fellow affiliates convened a meeting in Chicago to discuss a response. The group decided to create a new lobbying organization dedicated to stamping out the threat of new local stations. When a station owner asked what they should name their new lobbying organization, Nate Lord, of Louisville, Kentucky’s WAVE-TV, quipped: “Why don’t we just call it what we are: The National Association of Scared Fat Cats?”
After the station owners’ laughter died down, they settled on a more artful name for a lobbying outfit designed to minimize competition: the Association for Maximum Service Telecasters.