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1 article from 2006

26 December 2006 | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Dr. Frank Stanton, who became president of CBS in 1946 and ushered the network into the television age, died in his sleep in Boston Sunday at the age of 98. He remained president of the network for 26 years. A psychologist, Stanton had a keen sense of what audiences wanted and gave it to them. In the early days of television, he oversaw the launching of such hits as I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Gunsmoke, and The Twilight Zone. But at the same time he also contended with efforts by conservative groups to purge "pro-Communist" elements from the industry. He removed the ethnic sitcom The Goldbergs from the air after its producer/star refused to fire a leading actor who had been accused of communist affiliations, then imposed a "loyalty oath" on all CBS employees. "It [the loyalty oath] created a buffer zone between us and the people who were attacking us," he later said. (Stanton also later acknowledged that he was upset when he learned that more than a third of the audience who watched Sen. Joseph McCarthy's response to Edward R. Murrow's CBS documentary about him agreed with McCarthy that Murrow was pro-communist.) However, in 1971 he defied an order by the House of Representatives to turn over outtakes from a CBS Reports documentary, "The Selling of the Pentagon," as an unconstitutional intrusion into the editiorial processes of the network.

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1 article from 2006