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The New-Media Crisis of 1949

Network radio's fate has some lessons for today

The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck. They're trying to second-guess the ­future—so why not look back at the past? Today's new-media revolution, after all, is not the first time that technological change has laid waste to the best-laid plans of the old media. The same thing was happening 60 years ago.

Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own. Network radio was still the dominant mass entertainment ­medium. If you wanted to listen to Bing Crosby or "The Quiz Kids," you tuned in to their radio programs. While there were roughly 85 million radios in use throughout America, there were 1.3 million TV sets, 750,000 of which were on the East Coast. Television was still a pricey toy. A console set with a 16-inch picture tube cost $695 in 1949—half the price of a new car. Every TV station in the country was operating in the red, and NBC ran its fledgling TV network at a loss of $13,000 a day, $116,000 in ­today's dollars.

Milton Berle (left) during an episode of ‘Texaco Star Theater.’ ENLARGE
Milton Berle (left) during an episode of ‘Texaco Star Theater.’ Getty Images

But on Jan. 11 of that year, television in America turned a technological corner when eight stations on the East Coast and seven Midwestern stations were linked via the first long-distance coaxial cable. All at once it was possible for a significant slice of the American public to watch network TV programs live. Within a matter of weeks, Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater," previously known only to those who lived within range of one of NBC's nine East Coast affiliates, was being viewed in 24 cities by an audience of almost 4.5 million. In May, Time magazine put Berle on its cover: "As the clock nears 8 along the Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday night, a strange new phenomenon takes place in U.S. urban life. Business falls off in many a nightclub, theater-ticket sales are light, neighborhood movie audiences thin. Some late-hour shopkeepers post signs and close up for the night. . . . On big-city bar rails along the coast and in the Midwest, there is hardly room for another foot."

The success of "Texaco Star Theater" was no fluke. At year's end, a survey of 400 TV owners in Washington, D.C., told the tale: Adult attendance at movies was down 72%, while 36.7% of TV owners attended fewer baseball games. Meanwhile, the average amount of time that these Washingtonians spent listening to ­radio each day had plummeted from three hours and 42 minutes to less than half an hour.

"Maybe we old people can't adapt successfully to video," said Jim Jordan, the star of "Fibber McGee and Molly." Most of them, including Jordan, couldn't, while those who could jumped ship as fast as they could. So did their fans: Only 786,000 American households tuned into a radio show on any given night in 1950. Jack Benny and Bob Hope, the two most popular radio comedians, made their TV debuts that year. Twelve years later, CBS's "Suspense" and "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," the last nighttime radio drama series, were canceled. Network radio was dead.

Fred Allen, one of the many radio greats who was unable to establish himself on TV, groused about his failure in "Treadmill to Oblivion," his 1954 autobiography. Like today's old-time radio buffs, he argued that radio was superior to TV because the listener "had to use his imagination. . . . When television belatedly found its way into the home, after stopping off too long at the tavern, the advertisers knew they had a more potent force available for their selling purposes. Radio was abandoned like the bones at a barbecue." But ­Allen was gnawing on sour grapes. The truth is that network TV was neither intrinsically better nor worse than network ­radio. It was simply different—in a way that ordinary Americans preferred.

Does the fate of network radio have anything to teach today's old-media executives? Three lessons come to mind:




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