Commercial Television’s Secret Goldmine: The Hidden Riches Generated by US Network TV News, 1960–1970

Abstract

Network television news, in the United States, has been profitable since its inception. Yet network executives, scholars, and journalists continually repeat the myth that the commercial television networks historically provided news as a money-losing public service in the public interest. In testimony before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress, in public relations materials, and in memoirs and interviews, network news employees asserted, and continue to claim, that sacrificing advertising revenue while absorbing the costs incurred in producing news programs proved networks operated in the public interest. Yet much evidence reveals the inaccuracy of such assertions. News programming on American television attracted significant advertising revenue from its inception in the 1940s, as the success of commercial news shows such as NBC’s Camel News Caravan and CBS’s Television News with Douglas Edwards (sponsored by Oldsmobile), proved. But TV news only matured into the most lucrative form of commercial television programming during the 1960s. That transformative decade began the year John F. Kennedy was elected president, and ended in 1970, when ten years of overall television advertising revenue growth plateaued as the American economy began to retrench. The decade was filled with sensational and historic events relayed—often live, through innovative new technologies—directly into the homes of the American citizenry. The American populace’s increasing TV news habit during the 1960s attracted a growing roster of advertisers and sponsors who funded the expansion of news divisions, an increase in news programs, and, ultimately, the growing profitability of network TV news. The crucial moment in American broadcast journalism’s commercial evolution occurred in November 1963 when President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. The coverage of the assassination and the ensuing drama involving the president’s funeral, and the murder of presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, riveted a remarkably high percentage of Americans to their television sets. The reliability and professionalism of broadcast journalism over those days intensified, and propelled, the burgeoning attraction of commercial sponsors to television news. Within two years, news would emerge as the most lucrative genre of broadcasting on the commercial airwaves—with top news shows generating more gross advertising revenue for the broadcasting corporations than entertainment or sport programming. This distinct aspect of American television’s economic history has been largely ignored in both scholarship and public commentary on TV news. Instead, the myth that news failed to earn corporate profits prior to the emergence of the CBS News program 60 Minutes in the