Frank Stanton

Frank Nicholas Stanton (March 20 1908 - December 24 2006) was an American broadcasting executive who served as the president of CBS between 1946 and 1971 and then vice chairman until 1973. He also served as the chairman of the Rand Corporation from 1961 until 1967.

Along with William S. Paley, Stanton is credited with the significant growth of CBS into a communications powerhouse. He was also known for his keen sense of corporate style. That ranged from the standards he espoused as a broadcasting executive, to the design of everything from the company's current headquarters (Black Rock) to corporate stationery.

Life

Stanton was born in Muskegon, Michigan to Helen Josephine Schmidt and Frank Cooper Stanton. He attended high school in Dayton, Ohio. He then attended Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, receiving a B.A. in 1930. He taught for one year in the manual arts department of a high school in Dayton, and then attended Ohio State University, from where he received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1935. He also held a diploma from the American Board of Professional Psychology.

Stanton married childhood sweetheart Ruth Stephenson in 1931. The couple had no children.

Stanton died in his sleep at his home in Boston, Massachusetts on December 24, 2006 at the age of 98.

Work

Soon after earning his Ph.D., Stanton joined the CBS research department. During World War II, he consulted for the Office of War Information, the Secretary of War and the Department of the Navy, while serving as a vice president at CBS.

Stanton organized the first televised presidential debate in American history. After an eight-year effort, he finally managed to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to suspend Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934 for the election in 1960 to test a televised debate. The reason that Section 315 needed to be suspended was because it stated that equal air time must be given to all the candidates. The first debate was held and televised in the CBS studio in Chicago, with candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. After the debate, Stanton met with Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago, who decided that after seeing the debate he would tell his men to go all out for Kennedy.

While Edward R. Murrow's 1958 speech before the Radio and Television News Directors Association is often praised for its call for a deeper commitment among broadcasters to public service, Stanton in May 1959 (speaking before his graduate alma mater, Ohio State) also voiced his own commitment to public affairs. He promised that the following year, CBS would air a frequent prime-time public-affairs series, a series which later became CBS Reports. A few months later, in an October 1959 speech before the same RTNDA that Murrow had addressed in 1958, Stanton promised there would be no repeat of the program deceptions embodied by the quiz show scandals.

As president of CBS, Stanton's greatest battle with the government occurred in 1971, and focused on just this parallel to print press rights. The controversy surrounded "The Selling of the Pentagon," a CBS Reports documentary, which exposed the huge expenditure of public funds, partly illegal, to promote militarism. The confrontation raised the issue of whether television news programming deserved protection under the First Amendment.

Against threat of jail, Stanton refused the subpoena from the House Commerce Committee ordering him to provide copies of the outtakes and scripts from the documentary. He claimed that such materials are protected by the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First Amendment. Stanton observed that if such subpoena actions were allowed, there would be a "chilling effect" upon broadcast journalism.

For his efforts in that situation, Stanton was awarded one of three personal Peabody Awards (the others coming in 1959 and 1960). He also shared two other Peabodys that were awarded to CBS as a network (see List of Peabody Award winners).

Stanton led the fight for color television. On June 25 1951, Stanton appeared on an hour-long special, Premiere, with Robert Alda, Faye Emerson, Ed Sullivan, Arthur Godfrey, William Paley and others to introduce the CBS color sequential system of color TV. The CBS system was not compatible with existing black-and-white TV sets, and the FCC ultimately chose the RCA system of broadcasting color TV

Also in 1951, Stanton created an office to review the political leanings of CBS employees during the blacklist maintained by the TV networks.

Stanton played a role in the infamous controversy involving Arthur Godfrey, CBS's top money-earner in the early 1950s. Godfrey insisted that the cast members of two of his three CBS shows, a group of singers known as the "Little Godfreys," refrain from hiring managers. When one, Julius LaRosa, hired a manager following a minor dispute with Godfrey, the star consulted with Stanton, who suggested he release the popular LaRosa, then a rising star, on the air – just as he'd hired him on the air in 1951. On October 19, 1953, Godfrey fired LaRosa on the air, without LaRosa's knowing it was coming. The move caused an enormous backlash against Godfrey. Stanton later told Godfrey biographer Arthur Singer, author of the book Arthur Godfrey: The Adventures of an American Broadcaster, that "Maybe (the recommendation) was a mistake."

Stanton retired from CBS in 1973.

Legacy

Stanton was instrumental in developing televised presidential debates, which continue to be one of the primary vehicles by which the American public makes their decisions regarding presidential politics.

Stanton was revered both as a spokesman for the broadcast industry before Congress, and his passionate support of broadcast journalism and journalists. Former CBS News President Richard S. Salant - widely considered the greatest-ever chief of a network news division - himself praised Stanton as a corporate mentor and statesman.

The Frank Stanton Studios in Los Angeles house Minnesota Public Radio's Marketplace Productions

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Dunham, Corydon. Fighting for the First Amendment: Stanton of CBS vs. Congress and the Nixon White House, Praeger Trade (1997). ISBN 0275960277

External links

• "The Memoirs Of Frank Stanton" (APM/MPR)
• Bio: Museum of Broadcast Communications
• TV Week.com obituary
• Frank Stanton at the Internet Movie Database
• Notable New Yorkers - Frank Stanton Biography, photographs, and interviews of Frank Stanton from the Notable New Yorkers collection of the Oral History Research Office at Columbia University.

Credits

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