Frank Stanton
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Frank Nicholas Stanton (born March 20, 1908) is a retired U.S. businessman. He 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 know 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 attended high school in Dayton, Ohio. He then attended Ohio Wesleyan University, in Delaware, Ohio, receiving a B.A. 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 holds a diplomate from the American Board of Professional Psychology.
Stanton organized the first televised presidential debate in American history. Taking eight years, he finally managed to get Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934 suspended 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; John F. Kennedy vs. Richard M. 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. Daley's support made an enormous difference, because it turned out that Illinois determined the election.
The debates, however, ceased after the 1960 election, as Lyndon Johnson avoided debating in 1964 and Richard Nixon, having learned his lesson, 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...the 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 scandal.
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.
During his tenure at CBS he was awarded the Peabody Award three times and led the fight for color television. When William Golden tried to prepare a new ident shortly after the "eye symbol," 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."
Link: "The Memoirs Of Frank Stanton" (APM/MPR) http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2003/03/10_newsroom_stanton/
