Radio news grew and developed alongside the entertainment and cultural segments of broadcasting all through the thirties. Yet, from the very beginning, it always remained a separate, distinct entity and special part of broadcasting. At CBS, my associates and I recognized radio news as a unique service we could provide to the public, and we realized early that the prestige of our network would depend to a considerable extent upon how well we could provide such service. It seemed to me that if radio could broadcast the news of the day and special events, it would be a highly desirable service to the more serious listeners. In return, those listeners would appreciate radio—and particularly CBS—for giving them more thoughtful fare than just entertainment. It must be remembered that when I came to CBS in 1928, radio was looked upon by most people as a gadget, a toy, an amusing instrument of light entertainment.
Up until then, news on the networks had been scarce and episodic. At CBS, we had only a single teletype machine bringing us the news from the United Press, and we announced any big breaking stories from time to time.
In 1928, CBS covered the Republican and Democratic political conventions, the campaign speeches, and the election returns as they came in on election night. Radio brought Al Smith and Herbert Hoover right into your home. But the true magnitude of what a national network could do in covering a live news event dawned upon us and upon the nation with the all-day and into-the-night broadcast reports of the inauguration of President Hoover that first Monday in March 1929. The President-elect’s reception at the White House, the auto trip to the Capitol, the swearing-in, the ceremonial parade, the speeches, the inaugural ball—all were described as they occurred by CBS and NBC. The broadcasts broke all records for number of microphones used, announcers, technicians, miles of cable, and, finally, the size of the audience, estimated at 63 million. The significance of radio coverage of that event was inescapable.
The public interest in radio news encouraged us to expand our news and public affairs services. So, in the first few months of 1929, soon after CBS’s debut as a coast-to-coast network, we inaugurated our first regular daily news summary, our first regular program of political analysis and our first regular public affairs show. The first daily news summary over CBS was a five-minute segment which we introduced in a half-hour morning program called Something for Everyone. Then we hired two well-known newspapermen, who had experience on radio, to broadcast weekly fifteen-minute news commentaries for CBS: H. V. Kaltenborn from New York and Frederic William Wile from Washington.
CBS made giant strides in its news service in 1930 principally because of two other men who joined the network that year. When Ed Klauber came aboard as my assistant to help relieve me of administrative matters, he spent a good deal of his time, because of his long experience on the New York Times, as my adviser, guide, and mentor on how CBS should handle news. Paul White was hired away from the United Press and the United Features Syndicate to run our infant newsroom.
Klauber and I tackled a variety of problems which arose at the network. Our method was to discuss any given problem until we had exhausted the possibilities and alternatives involved. Once we made a decision we would get it down on paper and that would become a guiding policy for the network. Thus we agreed there would be no editorializing during news broadcasts, commentaries would be kept completely separate from the news itself, CBS news would be accurate and objective.
That was easy enough. But beyond that, we both wanted our radio news and commentaries to achieve a fairness and a balance. If we gave one side of a controversy, we would give equal time to the other side; if we presented a speaker with one viewpoint, we would try to counterbalance it with a viewpoint from the other side. It all seems rather simple now, but in those early days, it was absolutely new territory to explore.
We also decided that in hiring men for the CBS newsroom, we would favor the good newsman over the pleasant speaking voice. I became convinced that journalistic judgment was far more important in a radio newsman than any other quality. All of our future hiring at CBS News would reflect that very early decision.
These were long-range policies, but the most tactical decision we made was to give the man in charge of the newsroom the authority to interrupt regular programs with news bulletins. In the long run, this decision was instrumental in making CBS News one of the most important departments of the whole network. In effect, we were putting news on an equal—or perhaps superior—basis vis-à-vis the entertainment and commercial segments of the network. Thus, the ground rules and guidelines for radio news coverage and broadcasting, the professional ethics involved, all were laid down very early in the history of CBS. Paul White, himself an old news service hand, was instrumental in implementing these policies in our newsroom. He is also to be credited with setting the tone, vigor, and spirit of broadcast journalism, especially at CBS.
Our expansion of news and special events began when I sent Frederic Wile to the London Naval Disarmament Conference in January 1930. There he recruited Cesar Saerchinger, a forty-year-old reporter for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger to complete that assignment for him. We then decided we wanted someone to stay in London to cover Great Britain and the Continent for us and Saerchinger became that man. Some would call him CBS’s first “foreign correspondent,” but actually he was more of a “public affairs” man than a broadcaster. His job was not to cover news but to arrange for eminent persons to speak or to be interviewed on CBS about current events in Europe.
In the fall of 1930, Lowell Thomas, then well known for his personal adventure books and for his colorful travel lectures, came to see me about becoming a broadcaster. I was immediately impressed with him. Here was a man who had had remarkable experiences around the world. He was suave and well-spoken, a kind of hero to the American public. My enthusiasm for him got him on the air. I gathered the key editors of the Literary Digest and directors of Funk & Wagnalls, who were looking for a new personality for commentaries on current events, in the CBS board room. Then I signaled Lowell Thomas at a microphone in one of our audition rooms. He spoke without preparation and without a script. His voice was piped into the board room and one of the most fabulous careers in radio was launched. Because of prior commitments, the Literary Digest split the account: NBC would broadcast Lowell Thomas in the East and CBS would broadcast him simultaneously in the West. We introduced him over CBS as “a new radio voice, informing and entertaining you with the latest news of the day.” He was a natural radio personality and was well received. I would have liked to keep Thomas for CBS, but the next year NBC signed him exclusively. Sixteen years later, in 1947, he came back to CBS and stayed with us until his closing night, May 14, 1976: forty-six years on the air—one of the longest runs in broadcasting history.
During that one year, 1930, we put on more than six hundred domestic public affairs broadcasts, and, following the Naval Disarmament Conference more than eighty international broadcasts. At the time we limited ourselves to some extent to broadcasting fully anticipated news events. However, sometimes we were lucky to be on the spot at the right time. One of our affiliates had a microphone at an Ohio prison for a concert given by the prisoners, when a fire broke out. An inmate seized the microphone and began broadcasting the horrors of the conflagration. In the background the listener could hear the crackling and roar of the flames, the shouts of the firemen, and the screams of the dying. We tied the prisoners’ broadcast into the network and millions of Americans experienced this awesome event in which 320 inmates perished. As a broadcast, it was a harbinger of the news world to come: one day, even raging battlefields would be brought into the home.
In April 1931, CBS laid claim to being the number-one news network. At the top of all our press releases, we wrote: “Columbia—the ‘News’ Network.” We based our claim on the number of times we interrupted our regular commercial programs with bulletins of spot news, which were much more frequent than those of NBC. With a United Press teletype machine in our newsroom, it was a matter of policy to have our announcers interrupt programs with important bulletins. In fact, we urged the United Press to give us more news bulletins, more stories of national rather than local interest and more service from 8 A.M. to 12:30 A.M.
It was perfectly obvious to us that radio was particularly well suited for the communication of news to the nation. More than the printed word, the spoken voice could travel over the airwaves to remote areas of the country and the world, crossing the barrier of literacy, and reaching the widest and most diverse of audiences ever known. It was faster, more intimate, and more revealing. We were so vigorous in our pursuit of news for radio and so delighted with beating NBC in this area and so pleased with how well we were doing that we completely overlooked the rumblings and reactions of the newspaper establishment.
From the very beginning newspaper publishers were of two or more minds about radio. Some bought radio stations, or made connections with them, and so became part of the broadcasting industry. Others worried about competition for the advertising dollar. Still others believed as we did that news bulletins on the air encouraged readers to buy newspapers. On the whole, however, most newspaper publishers worried increasingly about the competition of radio news, seeing it more as a threat than complement to the press.
Nevertheless, we were taken by surprise when the American Newspaper Publishers Association at their 1931 annual meeting passed a resolution favoring newspaper control of radio news broadcasting. For two days at their convention, the publishers castigated the competition of radio in news and in advertising and many suggestions were made on how to curb radio from broadcasting the news received from the wire services before the newspapers themselves hit the streets. In the end, the publishers convention appointed a committee to confer with the press associations—the Associated Press, (AP), United Press, (UP), and the International News Service (INS)—with the aim of “bringing about proper regulations of such news broadcasting.” The publishers also resolved that radio program logs “if published, should be handled as paid advertising.”
This twofold threat was alarming. With the slump in newspaper advertising and the steady rise in the popularity of radio, newspaper publishers felt that radio was stealing advertising away from them. They were determined to fight back. Personally, I felt it was the slump in the economy during the Depression. Nevertheless, the tension between the press and radio increased throughout that year and the next.
In matters of this kind, it seems there is always one incident or another that triggers the explosion. Some say it was our coverage of the Lindbergh kidnaping. CBS was tipped off by telephone from a Newark newspaper. NBC got the news too, but withheld it until the newspapers came out. CBS put it on the air immediately, and followed it with intensive live coverage. We brought Boake Carter, a radio commentator from WCAU in Philadelphia, into our team on location in New Jersey, near the scene of the crime. Of all the crimes up to that time, none captured the attention of the nation so grippingly as the kidnaping of the Lindbergh baby. Our rapid-fire bulletins on that story irked the newspaper press. But we had our own sources of information and the publishers could only frown. Radio’s live coverage of the 1932 conventions, particularly the Democratic Convention, with its emotional contest between Alfred Smith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, captured the imagination of the radio public. All this brought about the competitive resentment of a good many newspaper publishers. They applied pressure upon the wire news services. The newspapers, as the major paying clients of the wire services as well as a source of news stories, apparently reasoned: Why should they allow this news to be given to the radio networks, which were competing with them for the public’s attention and the advertising dollar?
Whatever the causes behind it, the United Press in the middle of the 1932 presidential campaign suddenly cut off its regular service to CBS and NBC. We struggled along without the wire services until election night. Strangely enough, the UP had signed a separate contract to supply us with election returns from across the country. Then a few days before election night, it canceled that contract. But through a comedy of errors, we survived. The AP, not knowing of UP’s cancellation, also agreed to supply us with returns. Then, on election night itself, the UP must have discovered that its competitor was giving us the returns, for suddenly its teletype machine in our newsroom began chattering in the election returns. And to complete the circuit, the INS hastily installed a teletype in our newsroom. So, for the first time, CBS had all three news services at its disposal and we devoted the whole night to the election and capped it all off by putting the new President-elect, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on the air from Hyde Park, New York. Radio, through its two major networks, beat all the newspapers in the country with the election results.
Newspaper publishers were chagrined and angry over the success of radio in covering the election; some were still furious at radio’s growth in listeners and revenues at a time in the depths of the Depression when newspaper advertising revenues were falling off. At CBS we received rumors and then reports which confirmed the newspaper publishers’ intention to band together to deny the news wire services to radio stations or the networks. What came to be called “the press-radio war” broke out. It was serious business. Not only did the newspapers intend to cut off their news stories but they threatened to stop printing our schedules of daily programs (except as printed advertising) in their papers. Thus radio listeners would not be able to know or to plan what they wanted to hear on radio.
With my blessing, Ed Klauber wrote to Karl Bickel, president of the United Press, insisting that no one in radio had any desire to injure the press and no one had done anything in that direction. However, his letter stated firmly, “there must be news broadcasting and we have no intention whatever to recede from this field.” Pleading for peace and cooperation, we then made our own threat: if the newspaper publishers cut off our source of news, within forty-eight hours we would set up a news-gathering agency of our own. Bickel replied that he too was for peace and cooperation but that he would have to be guided by the wishes of the newspaper publishers.
Our reconciliation efforts came to nil. The following month, April 1933, the Associated Press, at its annual meeting of subscribing newspaper publishers, voted “that the Board of Directors shall not allow any news distributed by the Associated Press, regardless of source, to be given to any radio chain or chains. . . .” The UP and INS soon followed with a similar ban.
Then the American Newspaper Publishers Association at its 1933 annual meeting voted to stop listing radio programs in their newspapers except as advertising matter. Actually, it was a threat that was never widely implemented. Broadcasting magazine headlined the conflict succinctly: “A.P. and A.N.P.A. Declare War on Radio.” All our efforts to make peace with the newspapers failed. NBC struggled along without the news service, telephoning around the country for its information, but since we proclaimed CBS as the number-one news network, I finally made the decision to set up a news-gathering service of our own. The Columbia News Service was an unprecedented effort in broadcasting and Paul White, a great, hard-working newsman, spearheaded the remarkable job of putting together a world-wide news-gathering organization in a very brief time. He set up news bureaus in New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles and had their managers line up stringers (local newsmen engaged to work part-time) in almost every city in the country with a population of more than 20,000 and in some other less populous locations. NBC did not engage in any news-gathering operation. We were alone in confronting the publishers and wire services. For three months the war continued. CBS went on to purchase the Dow Jones ticker service, which brought us news from Washington as well as from the financial centers. In England we bought the services of the Exchange Telegraph, and the Central News Agency for coverage of Europe, Asia, Africa, and parts of South America.
Dispatches flowed into our newsroom. Paul White and his staff prepared three news programs each day, two five-minute newscasts and one fifteen-minute summary. White did so well that on occasion we had news stories that the newspapers missed. We even received inquiries from some newspapers about the cost of buying our news service. We had become competitive.
The newspaper publishers became even more angered. They must have begun also to worry about a new competing news service. On one occasion, Kent Cooper, general manager of the Associated Press and one of the most eminent newsmen in America, came to see me and tried to frighten me into making peace with the publishers. From his august perch atop the news media, he predicted dire consequences for CBS if we did not agree to limit the amount of news we would broadcast in competition with the newspapers and wire services. I recognized the greater facilities and the greater access to news of the three wire services and all the 1,800 newspapers in the United States, but I did not like to be threatened. And told him so. Frank B. Noyes, president of the Associated Press and president of the Washington Evening Star, was one of the publishers who carried out the threat of dropping the listings of CBS programs from his newspaper, while carrying the listings of NBC. The publishers then threatened through their National Radio Committee to carry on their fight against radio incursions into the news field in Congress, which was then beginning to consider the provisions of a federal communications act.
During the year, I had conferred several times with David Sarnoff, president of RCA and with M. H. Aylesworth, president of NBC, and we decided in November 1933 to meet with representatives of the press to discuss ways in which we in radio could live in peace with the newspaper publishers. In December, I met with Roy Howard, chairman of the Scripps-Howard chain, who agreed to act as an intermediary. Two days later, Aylesworth and I met with Associated Press’s Kent Cooper and United Press’s Karl Bickel, and we laid the groundwork for a press-radio peace meeting, which was held at the Hotel Biltmore in New York on December 11, 1933. There representatives of CBS, NBC, and the National Association of Broadcasters (representing local stations) met with the chieftains of the three wire news services and such newspapers as the Des Moines Register and Tribune, the Nashville Banner, the New York Sun, and the Hearst and Scripps-Howard chains.
We negotiated long and hard. The publishers wanted to get CBS out of the news-gathering field and they wanted to limit radio to announcing brief news items supplied by the newspapers through the wire services. Furthermore, they insisted that the news supplied to radio should not be used in competition with the newspapers. That is, they wanted radio news summaries to be broadcast only after the publication of the morning and afternoon papers.
I insisted with equal vehemence that radio was not invented as a service to hold things back: radio’s function was to bring news and public events to the public faster than any other medium because it was able to do just that. Speaking for NBC as well as CBS, I argued that we had an obligation to broadcast news as fast as we got it.
The result of all this was a compromise, which came to be called “the Biltmore Agreement.” We agreed on behalf of radio to drop our own news-gathering facilities, including the Columbia News Service, and in exchange, the publishers agreed to set up a special radio news bureau that would cull the news from the three wire services and send radio networks and stations two five-minute news summaries each day. We agreed to air the two news programs only at 9:30 in the morning and 9:00 in the evening. In return, they agreed to send us flash bulletins of news of “transcendent importance” for immediate broadcast. We agreed not to sell advertising for the two news-summary programs, but they agreed that we could find sponsors for our news commentaries.
The agreement was a trade-off and it accomplished its one immediate purpose of bringing peace in the family of newspapers and radio news coverage. The broadcasting of live news was not mentioned at all. That was our own exclusive field and not negotiable. It was also tacitly understood that the newspapers would continue to carry the listings of radio program schedules.
What the Press-Radio Bureau agreed upon did not come into being until the following year, on March 1, 1934, and by that year, no one was paying much attention to any of the provisions of the so-called agreement. The number of flash bulletins had increased dramatically. Almost all spot news was being supplied to the radio stations as news of “transcendent importance.” Radio commentators again began to use spot news in their analyses and commentaries. Then other competing radio news agencies arose to sell their services to disgruntled radio stations, so that in 1935, the UP and the INS joined in the competition to sell news to radio stations. For all intents and purposes, the Biltmore Agreement was dead. The time schedules for radio news summaries fell by the wayside and even the stations which subscribed to the Press-Radio Bureau were able to broadcast news summaries as early as 8 A.M. and 6 P.M. In short, none of the restrictions imposed upon radio worked for very long. In the end, radio could not be held back from performing its vital role in bringing the news to listeners faster than any other medium. I wondered afterward about the wisdom of my decision to abandon the Columbia News Service. But one cannot know the road untraveled. CBS might have had an earlier lead in developing its own news-gathering prowess. But at the time, we really did not have a need for such a large organization to put together the short news summaries customary at that time. When the need arose in later years, CBS moved on its own without hesitation to gather and to broadcast news from around the world.
The ultimate, long-range effect of that press-radio war of the thirties was the demonstration and proof that fledgling radio could stand up to the newspaper barons of the day. The two major networks, CBS and NBC, came head-to-head against the dominant newspaper and wire services and, despite some lingering bitterness, radio (and later television) won recognition as full-fledged members of the Fourth Estate, co-equal with newspapers in the dissemination of the news. Radio would never be controlled or dominated by the print media.