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1941 in American television

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a list of American television-related events in 1941.

Events

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  • January - The NBC-owned radio network Blue Network has completed a phase of expansion. While it had 33 stations in 1937, this total had nearly tripled by January 1941, when the network had 92 stations coast to coast.[1]
  • May - The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued formal rules to break up what it perceived to be monopolies in radio. One of these rules specifically barred a network from operating more than one hookup. The rule aimed directly against NBC's ownership of two radio networks.[2]
  • July 1-
    • The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed full-fledged commercial television broadcasts to begin on July 1, 1941. NBC station W2XBS in New York City received the first commercial license, adopting the call letters WNBT. The first official, paid television advertisement broadcast by any U.S. station was for watch manufacturer Bulova, which aired that day, just before the start of a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball telecast on WNBT. The ad consisted of test pattern, featuring the newly assigned WNBT call letters, which was modified to resemble a clock – complete with functioning hands – with the Bulova logo (featuring the phrase "Bulova Watch Time") in the lower right-hand quadrant of the test pattern (a photograph of the NBC camera setting up the test pattern-advertisement for that ad can be seen at this page). Among the programs that aired during the first week of WNBT's new, commercial schedule was The Sunoco News, a simulcast of the Sun Oil-sponsored NBC Radio program anchored by Lowell Thomas; amateur boxing at Jamaica Arena; the Eastern Clay Courts tennis championships; programming from the USO; the spelling bee-type game show Words on the Wing; a few feature films; and a one-time-only, test broadcast of the game show Truth or Consequences, sponsored by Lever Brothers.[3][4][5][6]
    • For a one-time experiment, the radio game show Truth or Consequences is televised on the first day of New York station WNBT's commercial program schedule. It was the first game show to air on broadcast television. However, the series did not appear on television again until 1950, when the medium had caught on commercially.[7][8]
  • July 2 - Debut of the televised game show CBS Television Quiz on the CBS television station in New York City, WCBW Channel 2 (the forerunner of WCBS-TV). It was the first game show to be broadcast regularly on television. It was an in-house production and broadcast in black and white. The host was Gil Fates, with Frances Buss as scorekeeper.[9][10]The CBS Television Quiz followed an answer-and-question format: contestants were given a clue and were asked to provide a question that the clue would answer. Beyond this, little is known about the show's mechanics.[11]
  • December 31- The antitrust division of the United States Department of Justice filed an antitrust action against NBC and CBS, seeking to break up the networks' methods of operation. Mutual, at the same time, filed an antitrust suit of its own, in the amount of $10.275 million, according to the January 12, 1942, edition of Time.[12]

Television programs

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Debuts

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Date Debut Network
July 1[13][14][15] CBS Television News CBS
July 1[16] Truth or Consequences WNBT
July 2[17][18] CBS Television Quiz WCBW
December 19[19][20] America's Town Meeting of the Air NBC

Births

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Deaths

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References

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  1. ^ "The Blue Network Today", page 3.
  2. ^ See the 1942 edition of the Britannica Book of the Year, under the entry for "Radio", page 556, as well as the May 12, 1941, edition of Time Chains Unchained?
  3. ^ "June 30 WNBT program schedule". TVHistory.tv. Archived from the original on 2011-01-18. Retrieved 2022-03-26.
  4. ^ "Imagery For Profit" R.W. Stewart, The New York Times, July 6, 1941.
  5. ^ [1] Archived October 9, 2008, at the Wayback Machine WNBT/Bulova test pattern
  6. ^ "Novel Commercials in Video Debut" (PDF). Broadcasting. 7 July 1941. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
  7. ^ "Station WNBT Week of June 30th–July 5th, 1941". Retrieved 10 January 2012.
  8. ^ "Debuts, Highlights, Changes (Continued)". Ross Reports on Television including The Television Index. September 3, 1950. p. 2. Retrieved September 17, 2022.
  9. ^ "Television Obscurities - Television Programs in 1941". Television Obscurities. 22 December 2009. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  10. ^ Abelman, Robert (1998). Reaching a Critical Mass: A Critical Analysis of Television Entertainment. L. Erlbaum Associates. pp. 270. ISBN 978-0-8058-2199-4.
  11. ^ Abelman, Robert (1998). Reaching a Critical Mass: A Critical Analysis of Television Entertainment. L. Erlbaum Associates. pp. 270. ISBN 978-0-8058-2199-4.
  12. ^ Time magazine, January 12, 1942 Old Law v. New Thing
  13. ^ "WCBW Schedule, Week of June 29th, 1941 - Television Obscurities". Television Obscurities. 2016-01-05. Retrieved 2018-08-04.
  14. ^ Mike, Conway (2006-10-01). "The Birth of CBS-TV News: An Ambitious Experiment at the Advent of U.S. Commercial Television". Journalism History. 32 (3). ISSN 0094-7679.
  15. ^ Conway, Mike (2009). The Origins of Television News in America: The Visualizers of CBS in the 1940s. Peter Lang. ISBN 9781433106026.
  16. ^ "Station WNBT Week of June 30th–July 5th, 1941". Retrieved 10 January 2012.
  17. ^ "Television Obscurities - Television Programs in 1941". Television Obscurities. 22 December 2009. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  18. ^ Abelman, Robert (1998). Reaching a Critical Mass: A Critical Analysis of Television Entertainment. L. Erlbaum Associates. pp. 270. ISBN 978-0-8058-2199-4.
  19. ^ Jay, Robert (2013-12-17). "WNBT Schedule, Week of December 14th, 1941". Television Obscurities. Retrieved 2019-07-02.
  20. ^ "19 Feb 1942, 563 - Daily News at Newspapers.com". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 2019-07-02.

Sources

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  • Blue Network Company (1943). The Blue Network Today; a Memorandum on Its First Independent Year, and Its Present Position in the American System of Broadcasting, with a Note on Blue History. New York: Blue Network Company, Inc. OCLC 43939184.
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