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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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but when that same agency brought another program to us and put it on Saturday night, as soon as time opened up on NBC, they moved it over to NBC. We had no contractual control. Why did they do it? Generally advertisers moved programs from CBS to NBC because NBC in the radio days had the superior facilities. Why did they have the superior facilities? Because they got in the line first in terms of having the lower frequencies and the higher power. So we had the low powered stations, they had the high powered stations. And while we had almost as good coverage of the country, there were advantages to their physical facilities. So if you were an advertiser and you developed a show that was going well on CBS, it would go even better if you could get the same time period, or a comparable time period, on NBC. Broke my heart to have things develop on our network and then have the advertiser say: “Sorry, buddy. We're going over to NBC because they opened up a better time period.”

Q:

There was a lot happening in the other direction as well. Right?

Stanton:

What?

Q:

A lot of stars were being wooed away from NBC to CBS in the late fifties.

Stanton:

Well, that's what led us into the raiding of NBC stars, was so that we could lock the stars into our program schedule and you couldn't move the program.

So that was the strategy that brought “Amos 'n Andy,” Jack Benny, Charlie McCarthy, and those programs, Fred Allen, over to CBS, was because we made financial deals with the talent so attractive that they signed exclusives, that they would only play on CBS facilities. And that carried over, of course, into the television days, but to a limited extent because we





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