ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television (Sport in World History) (Sport in World History, 4, Band 4) - Softcover

Vogan, Travis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520292960 ISBN 13: 9780520292963

Verlag: University of California Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

ABC Sports shaped how the world consumes sport. The American Broadcasting Company's sports division is behind some of network television's most significant practices, celebrated personalities, and iconic moments. It created the weekend anthology Wide World of Sports, transformed professional football into a prime-time spectacle with Monday Night Football, fashioned the Olympics into a mega media event, and even revolutionized TV news. Travis Vogan's cultural and institutional history of ABC Sports examines the development of network sports television in the United States and the aesthetic, cultural, political, and industrial practices that mark it. ABC Sports traces the storied division from its beginnings through the internet age to reveal the changes it endured along with the new sports media environment it spawned. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Travis Vogan is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire.

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"Travis Vogan's cultural history of ABC Sports offers a compelling analysis of America's love affair with sports. It provides an inside look at how that love was cultivated through sport's marriage to television on an altar where ABC's constant telling of the 'thrill of victory and agony of defeat' taught an entire culture how to think about sporting achievement. This is essential reading for any fan or student of contemporary sport."—Lawrence Wenner, editor-in-chief of Communication & Sport

"Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, Wide World of Sports and Monday Night Football, the tragedy at Munich and the emptiness of TrashSports are all part of the genius of Roone Arledge and his empire at ABC Sports. Arledge taught a generation of viewers how to watch sports, how to love them, and how to hate them. Travis Vogan's deep look into the world Arledge created suggests the meaning and legacy of televised sports. This is a book for anyone who cares about sports and worries about the future of the beast."—Randy Roberts, coauthor of A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle

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"Travis Vogan's cultural history of ABC Sports offers a compelling analysis of America's love affair with sports. It provides an inside look at how that love was cultivated through sport's marriage to television on an altar where ABC's constant telling of the 'thrill of victory and agony of defeat' taught an entire culture how to think about sporting achievement. This is essential reading for any fan or student of contemporary sport."—Lawrence Wenner, editor-in-chief of Communication & Sport

"Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, Wide World of Sports and Monday Night Football, the tragedy at Munich and the emptiness of TrashSports are all part of the genius of Roone Arledge and his empire at ABC Sports. Arledge taught a generation of viewers how to watch sports, how to love them, and how to hate them. Travis Vogan's deep look into the world Arledge created suggests the meaning and legacy of televised sports. This is a book for anyone who cares about sports and worries about the future of the beast."—Randy Roberts, coauthor of A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle

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ABC Sports

The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television

By Travis Vogan

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Travis Vogan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29296-3

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: ABC Sports and Network Sports Television, 
1 • The "Almost Broadcasting Company" and the Birth of ABC Sports, 
2 • ABC's Wide World of Sports: "The Seedbed of Modern Sports Television" and the Cold War, 
3 • "The Network of the Olympics": Starring Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, 
4 • Monday Night Football, Brian's Song, and the Roots of the Prime-Time TV Event, 
5 • The News from Munich on the "Arledge Broadcasting Company", 
6 • "What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports Is Going On Here?": TrashSports and Scandal, 
7 • "No More Sacred Cows": The End of ABC Sports' Golden Age, 
Conclusion: From Wide World of Sports to the Worldwide Leader in Sports, 
Appendix 1: Wide World of Sports Inaugural Season Schedule, 1961, 
Appendix 2: ABC's Wide World of Sports Athlete of the Year, 
Appendix 3: Top Fifteen Television Audiences of All Time as of Roots' Premiere, 
Appendix 4: Top Ten Most-Watched Wide World of Sports Episodes, 
Abbreviations, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The "Almost Broadcasting Company" and the Birth of ABC Sports

Sports programming put ABC on the television map.

BERT SUGAR, journalist and historian

ACCORDING TO BROADCAST HISTORIAN WILLIAM BODDY, "The American television industry underwent its deepest and most lasting changes in the middle years of the 1950s." Of the three major networks that survived the decade, ABC — the youngest of the bunch — endured the most drastic shifts. It nearly folded, was sold to United Paramount Theaters, and was forced to develop inventive strategies to counteract its comparative feebleness. Sports became one of its chief survival techniques. The network's annual commitment to sporting content increased 600 percent over the 1950s and culminated with its March 1961 creation of ABC Sports — the first network sports division. ABC Sports gave the traditionally unpopular network an identity and became the laboratory at which Roone Arledge developed his foundational aesthetic.

HARD ROCK

ABC was born the bastard child of the Radio Corporation of America's (RCA) National Broadcasting Company. The "Second Depression" of 1937 — a recession within the Great Depression that deflated what few strides the economy had made since the 1929 stock market crash — compelled the US government to intensify its scrutiny of the large trusts and monopolies blamed for the financial crisis. The film and radio industries composed high-profile targets that signaled no entity would evade inspection. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) specifically began to investigate chain broadcasting — the practice of programming multiple radio stations to air the same content simultaneously. Its 1941 Report on Chain Broadcasting ruled that no single organization could broadcast on more than one network.

Two years later, the FCC deemed RCA's ownership of both the NBC Red Network and the NBC Blue Network anticompetitive and forced it to sell one of the properties. Unsurprisingly, RCA owner David Sarnoff opted to unload the less popular Blue Network, which focused on public affairs programming and was limited to low-power stations in small markets. Sarnoff found an eventual buyer in Edward J. Noble, the Life Savers Corporation owner and entrepreneur who thought a radio network might compose a promotionally rich complement to his many other ventures. Noble procured NBC Blue in October 1943 for $8 million, the highest price paid for a broadcasting entity to that date. The network, which came along with 168 affiliates and 715 employees, went by "Blue" until Noble purchased and adopted the name American Broadcasting Company in June 1945. Despite the title change, ABC retained Blue's comparative unpopularity and was distinguished only by its lower ratings, less prominent advertisers, and fewer affiliates. The network, wrote Forbes, "scraped along on the crumbs that fell from the table at which the big two were feasting." As a result, ABC was known throughout the industry as the "Almost Broadcasting Company" and was constrained to engage in activities its competitors considered déclassé. "To get a modicum of income and to show a modest profit," explained eventual ABC president Oliver "Ollie" Treyz, "ABC took a relaxed view of standards established by NBC and CBS. We took spots for deodorants and laxatives, which the other guys wouldn't take." As part of the struggling network's efforts to subsist, ABC followed CBS's, NBC's, and the short-lived broadcasting upstart DuMont's entrances into the new medium of television.

As with RCA, the FCC found Paramount Pictures Inc. — which comprised a movie studio and theater chain — to be restricting trade. The 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc. ruling, colloquially known as the Divorcement Decree, forced Paramount to separate its studio and theater arms into separate entities, Paramount Pictures Corporation and United Paramount Theaters (UPT), so it could not simply fill its theaters with the movies it produced and ignore competitors' products. Media historian Douglas Gomery calls the ruling "one of [the twentieth] century's more bitter and drawn-out antitrust battles," which permanently altered Hollywood's distribution and exhibition practices. Beyond extricating itself from Paramount Pictures, United Paramount Theaters had to reduce its theater chain from 1,395 to 650 within five years. The windfall it received from selling those theaters poised the company to collect new assets. UPT president Leonard H. Goldenson, who joined Paramount as a lawyer in 1933 and took over after the divorcement, figured television would be a sensible place to invest the proceeds given the medium's similarities to, shared audience with, and ability to promote film.

But much to Goldenson's chagrin, it was impossible for prospective broadcasters to secure station licenses at the time. The FCC's Sixth Report and Order initiated a station freeze the same year as the Divorcement Decree. Originally slated for six months, the freeze extended more than three years — from September 30, 1948, until April 14, 1952. Aside from blocking potential station owners like UPT, the freeze solidified industrial hierarchies. The less popular ABC and DuMont networks continued to lose money during this period while CBS and NBC maintained their long-standing supremacy. "Given the station allocation plan contained within the FCC's Sixth Report and Order," explains broadcast historian Stewart Lewis Long, "most observers felt it was only a matter of time before either ABC or DuMont, or both networks, would go out of business." Goldenson sought television stations, not necessarily ABC. But the only way he could acquire stations at this time was by purchasing an entity that already owned them. Though "only a skeleton of a network," ABC had five stations — the maximum the FCC permitted at the time — in five of the United States' top six markets.

Noble — a notorious cheapskate who reportedly gave employees Life Savers candies as Christmas bonuses — demanded $25 million for ABC, far more than the losing venture's projected value. He bargained with UPT by averring that CBS president William S. Paley expressed...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520292960
• ISBN 13: 9780520292963
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar