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.

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 1935. He also held a diploma from the American Board of Professional Psychology. 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.

The debates, however, ceased after the 1960 election, as Lyndon B. Johnson avoided debating in 1964, and Nixon, widely perceived to have made a poor impression on television viewers in 1960, declined to debate in 1968 and in 1972. Thus televised presidential debates did not resume until 1976, when incumbent president Gerald Ford, perceiving he was behind in the polls, agreed to debate challenger Jimmy Carter.

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.

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 [1].

Also in 1951, Stanton created an office to review the political leanings of CBS employees during the blacklist maintained by the TV networks. Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), the movie portraying this era directed by George Clooney, left Stanton out of the film as a character, partly because Stanton was still living and might have objected to his portrayal.

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."

When William Golden tried to prepare a new logo shortly after the famous CBS "eye symbol," (pictured) Stanton overruled him: "Just when you're beginning to be bored by what you've done is when it's beginning to be noticed by your audience." The decision stuck.

Stanton died in his sleep at his home in Boston, Massachusetts on December 24, 2006 at the age of 98.[2]

Legacy

The Frank Stanton Studios in Los Angeles house Minnesota Public Radio's Marketplace Productions [3].

Reference

• The New York Times, December 26 2006: "Frank Stanton, Broadcasting Pioneer, Dies at 98." Dr. Frank Stanton, a central figure in the development of television broadcasting in the United States and the industry’s most articulate and persuasive spokesman during his nearly three decades as president of CBS, died Sunday afternoon at his home in Boston, Elizabeth Allison, a longtime friend, said today. He was 98 and had been in declining health, she said [4].

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

Credits

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