Leaning Tower of Babel

Television's proud edifice, though still unfinished, is already showing cracked plaster and faulty brickwork. Last week, the architects were blaming everything from the other fellow to the unseasonable weather.

Hardest hit were the networks, which have poured the most money into TV and reaped the least profit. This year CBS has made $500,000 less than it did in the first half of 1948. Du Mont's books have a reddish tinge and ABC, which can least afford it, is losing most of all. NBC does not release a balance sheet, but it is no exception. Of 76 TV stations in the U.S., only six claimed to be breaking even or making money. Manhattan's WPIX, owned by the New York Daily News, dropped $1,000,000 in 1948.

Blue & White Chips. What happened to everybody this summer was a sudden exodus of TV advertisers, plus an unexpected slump in the sales of receiving sets. Explained Charles G. Mortimer Jr., vice president of General Foods Corp.: "There's one big difference between radio's early days and television's: in radio you had a chance to get in the game [for a] stack of white chips--in television, for national advertisers like ourselves, it takes several stacks of blues to find out whether you've got a pair of deuces or a full house. This, frankly, is giving some advertisers pause."

Although more than 100 manufacturers were making TV sets, 90% of the sales still went to the industry's Big Eight (Admiral, Crosley, Du Mont, Emerson, General Electric, Motorola, Philco and RCA). Last winter both big & small manufacturers were booming confidently ahead in the expectation that 1949 was going to be a 2,500,000-set year. This spring they crashed into a roadblock of buyer resistance. By last week, many of the smaller companies were hanging on by their fingernails.

Lifting Gloom. Writers and actors were also grousing. In Variety, Scripter Carroll Carroll wrote: "Perhaps the pump has to be primed by the government... Oil has tax advantages. Aviation has subsidies. Why not offer similar inducements to throw heavy money into TV?"

Actors, without union representation because of a jurisdictional scuffle between seven affiliated entertainment unions, were working in TV for as little as $5 a show, including rehearsal time.

But there was one rift in the prevailing gloom. Martin Codel, editor of Television Digest, reported a flutter of optimism: "Every speculation for fall is good. The reports are too uniform to be mere pep talk. The depression feeling has been completely reversed. With the big football schedules coming up and all the possible World Series towns now linked by coaxial cable, television ought to get off to a big start by fall."

Most encouraging factor was the appearance of the $200 (or, rather, the ($199.95) television set on the market. It was a good set and, under liberalized installment-buying regulations, within reach of most U.S. pocketbooks. Commercial sponsors, after their summer desertion, were beginning to come back to the fold--TV networks have more business scheduled for this autumn than ever before.

Despite the surface evidence that television had built too quickly and recklessly, the industry was keeping its fingers crossed and hoping that it would be snug and shipshape by the first winds of winter.

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