Relatively untested as a business executive, Paley immediately showed himself a superb entrepreneur. He ensured the success of the new network by offering affiliates free programming in exchange for an option on advertising time, and he was extremely aggressive in gaining advertising for the network. Paley’s greatest gift, however, was in recognizing talent. He soon signed singers such as Bing Crosby, Kate Smith, and Morton Downey for the network. Unfortunately, as soon as some of them gained fame at CBS, they were lured away by the far richer and more popular NBC.

This pattern of losing talent to the competition was not to be repeated in the news realm. Starved for programming, Paley initially allowed his network to be used by the likes of the demagogic Father Charles Coughlin. By 1931, however, Paley had terminated Coughlin’s broadcasts, and under the aegis of former New York Times editor Edward Klauber and ex–United Press reporter Paul White, he began building a solid news division.

CBS News did not come of age, however, until Klauber assigned the young Edward R. Murrow to London as director of European talks. On March 13, 1937, at the time of the Anschluss, Murrow teamed with former newspaper foreign correspondent William L. Shirer and a number of others to describe those events in what would become the forerunner of The CBS World News Roundup. Subsequently, during World War II, Murrow assembled a brilliant team of reporters, known collectively as “Murrow’s Boys,” including Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, Winston Burdett, Richard K. Hottelet, and Larry LeSueur.

In 1948 Paley turned the tables on NBC and signed some of its premier talent, including Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and George Burns and Gracie Allen. He also stole a march on his rival in what NBC considered its undisputed realm—technology—when his CBS Research Center, under the direction of the brilliant inventor Peter Goldmark, developed the long-playing (LP) phonograph recording technique and color television.

Even with this success, Paley was still loathe to enter television broadcasting. However, with prodding from Frank Stanton, whom he had appointed CBS president in 1946, and his growing awareness of how rapidly television was expanding, Paley began increasing CBS investment in television programming. Indeed, with the talent that CBS had taken from NBC and homegrown artists and programming such as I Love Lucy, Ed Sullivan, Arthur Godfrey, and Gunsmoke, CBS dominated in the audience ratings race for almost 20 years.

The postwar years were hardly an undisturbed triumphal march for CBS. During the McCarthy era, the network found itself dubbed the “Communist Broadcasting System” by conservatives. Nor did CBS distinguish itself by requiring loyalty oaths of its staff and hiring a former FBI man as head of a loyalty clearance office. These actions were, however, redeemed to a large extent by Murrow’s March 9, 1954, See It Now broadcast investigating Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Un fortunately, Murrow’s penchant for controversy tarnished him in the eyes of many CBS executives, and shortly thereafter, in 1961, he resigned to head the U.S. Information Agency.

More and more the news division, which thought of itself as the crown jewel at CBS, found itself subordinate to the entertainment values of the company, a trend highlighted at the end of the 1950s by the quiz show scandals. Indeed, Paley, who had taken CBS public in 1937, now seemed to make profits his priority. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this development occurred when Fred Friendly, one of Murrow’s closest associates and then CBS News division president, resigned after reruns of I Love Lucy were shown instead of the 1966 Senate hearings on the Vietnam War.

This tendency to emphasize entertainment over news was only exacerbated in the 1960s, when, despite almost universal critical disdain, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction were CBS’s biggest hits. However, in the early 1970s, CBS abruptly shifted away from these programs, as programming executives Robert Wood and Fred Silverman inaugurated a series of sitcoms such as All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and M*A*S*H. These changes had less to do with any contempt for the rural idiocy of the “barnyard comedies” than the network’s need to appeal to a younger, urban audience with larger disposable incomes. However, the newer programs, with their socially conscious themes, garnered both audience and critical acclaim.

During these years, profits increased to such an extent that by 1974 the Columbia Broadcasting System had become CBS, Inc., and consisted not only of radio and TV networks but a publishing division (Holt, Reinhart, and Winston), a magazine division (Woman’ s Day), a recording division (Columbia Records), and even for a time the New York Yankees (1964–73). Nevertheless, CBS, Inc., was hardly serene. Indeed, it was quite agitated over the question of who would succeed Paley.

In violation of his own rule, Paley refused to retire. He did, however, force the 1973 retirement of his logical heir, Stanton. Paley then installed and quickly forced the resignation of Arthur Taylor, John Backe, and Thomas Wyman as presidents and chief executive officers of CBS. Anxiety about the succession at CBS began to threaten the network’s independence. Declining ratings left the company vulnerable. The biggest threat came from a takeover bid by cable mogul Ted Turner. To defend itself against a takeover, CBS turned to the president of the Loew’s chain of movie theaters, Laurence Tisch, who soon owned a 25 percent share in the company and became president and CEO in 1986.

Within a year, Tisch’s cuts in personnel and budget, and his sale of assets such as the recording, magazines, and publishing divisions, had alienated many. Dan Rather, who had succeeded the avuncular Walter Cronkite as the anchor on The CBS Evening News in 1981, wrote a scathing New York Times commentary called “From Murrow to Mediocrity.” By 1990, the year of Paley’s death, The CBS Evening News, which had led in the ratings for 18 years under Cronkite, and for a long period under Rather, fell to number three in the rankings.

After what seemed a brief ratings resurrection resulting from the success of the 1992 Winter Olympics, and the 1993 coup of wresting late-night host David Letterman away from NBC, CBS was outbid for the television rights to National Football League (NFL) games by the fledgling FOX network and watched the defection of 12 choice affiliates to the same company. Despite repeated denials that the company was for sale, Tisch shopped it to prospective buyers such as former Paramount and FOX president Barry Diller. In November 1995, CBS was sold to the Westinghouse Corporation for $5.4 billion, effectively bringing to a close CBS’s history as an independent company.

In 1996 Westinghouse, under the leadership of its CEO Michael Jordan, merged with Infinity Broadcasting Corporation. The CEO of Infinity, Mel Karmazin, became the largest shareholder in the merged company, which was renamed CBS Corporation in 1997. In 1998 CBS reacquired the rights to NFL football for eight years for $4 billion dollars. The price of CBS stock fell as a result of this deal, and Karmazin supplanted Jordan as the CEO of the company. Realizing that the company was too small to stand on its own in an era of media megamergers such as that of Disney and ABC-TV, Karmazin successfully concluded a deal with Viacom’s CEO Sumner Redstone to sell CBS for $37.3 billion in 1999. Karmazin became the chief operating officer of Viacom. Because Viacom already owned a network, the fledgling United Paramount Network (UPN), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) carefully scrutinized this deal before finally permitting the duopoly.

Viacom’s purchase of CBS coincided with an increase in the network’s ratings. Despite Wall Street’s misgivings, the NFL deal turned out to be profitable. In addition, in the summer of 2000, CBS introduced a miniseries called Survivor, which quickly was dubbed “reality TV.” The program involved a group of people selected by the producers, such as the mephistophelean Richard Hatch, who were placed on a remote Pacific island and then tested with various trials that pitted one group against another until only one person remained. This individual was then awarded $1 million. The final episode of the first series received Super Bowl–like ratings and launched a trend of reality TV shows on virtually every network. While later editions of Survivor have not matched the hype or the ratings of the first version, they have performed well against stiff competition, such as NBC’s hit sitcom Friends. In addition to Survivor, CBS’s programming chief, Leslie Moonves, can also take credit for scheduling sitcoms such as Everybody Loves Raymond and Becker and dramas such as C.S.I. and Judging Amy that helped raise CBS’s ratings in the early 21st century. In another key move to keep CBS’s entertainment division healthy, Moonves managed to sign David Letterman in 2002 to a multiyear contract, thereby thwarting a highly publicized attempt by ABC to lure away the host of The Late Show.

Unfortunately for its network, in the early 2000s, CBS News continued to languish in third place in the network news race. However, The CBS Evening News under the aegis of Rather regarded itself as a “hard news” show that did not indulge in the soft features such as health, entertainment, and lifestyle news that appeared so frequently on its rivals. This dedication to hard news was most prominently on display during the summer of 2001, when The CBS Evening News stood out in its determination not to indulge in the media frenzy that surrounded the possible involvement of California congressman Gary Condit in the disappearance of Chandra Levy, who interned in Condit’s Washington office. Needless to say, it was efforts such as these that helped restore some of the sheen to the reputation of CBS that it had lost during the Tisch years.