Highlights of television in 1948 and 1949

OK, my first summary review of television as a whole, so we’re going to be touching on a bunch of stuff.

Firstly, as outlined in the beginning, television was growing with 108 new station licenses being issued by the beginning of the fall of 1948. In addition, advertisers could see television as a growing source of revenue and sales with a 515% increase in purchased sponsor time over the previous year.

Networks were also establishing presences in television with CBS beginning network standardized programming. That is to say, especially in prime time, you could turn on a CBS network anywhere in the country and generally see the same thing, depending on the time zone. At the same time, the Du Mont network began to take off with another television staple: the introduction of professional wrestling. For the intellectual, there was the CBS-TV News, the first nightly news broadcast in the country.

As good as 1948 was good for television, 1949 was even better. In one night, the world got smaller when coaxial cable linked the Midwest and Eastern television broadcasts for all the networks on January 11. Television also began to recognize itself with the introduction of the Emmy Awards on January 31, however, given television was still rather insular, only shows in the Los Angeles area market were eligible for the awards.

At the same time, television standards were also being set when the Federal Communications Commission, or the FCC, passed the Fairness Doctrine. In essence, it requires all the broadcasting stations to present fair and equal coverage to both sides of any controversial issues they may wish at address, a standard that would last until 1987.

Now, you may ask, what about ratings for the various programs of this time frame? Sad and simple fact: they didn’t exist. The Nielsen ratings numbers that shows live and die by today were not introduced until 1950, so getting exact measurements for how well a show was doing was not easy. It is known that Milton Berle and his Texaco Star Theater were the big draws of the time though. How big would finally be determined in 1950.

Which brings us to 1950… I’ll cover this year in more detail once we get done with the 1950 shows, starting with a theme that would dominate the entire decade. A television staple already underway with Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger, over the next few posts, we’ll start to get an idea just how big the television Westerns would get to be.