Who killed captain video? How the FCC strangled a TV pioneer

Reason, March, 2005 by Glenn Garvin

Bishop Sheen stayed with DuMont until the day it went dark before moving his show over to ABC. More typically DuMont built a star's reputation, then watched him bolt to another network with deeper pockets. For most of its life, DuMont tottered on a financial abyss, too poor to promote its programs or to fund them properly. (The stark, seedy look of Jackie Gleason's Honeymooners apartment had as much to do with the poverty of DuMont's props department as with any creative impulse.)

Part of the problem was Allen Du Mont himself, a visionary engineer but an uncertain businessman and a political nail. A polio victim whose bed-bound childhood was spent putting together crystal radio kits, he went to work after college manufacturing radio tubes first for Westinghouse, then for DeForest. When the latter went bust, he set out on his own in 1929, building cathode-ray tubes in his garage. Initially the fragile tubes were used mostly in medical and military equipment, but as Du Mont improved their shelf life, television became a practical possibility. In 1938 he started manufacturing sets. Two years later he set up New York City's second TV station, hoping to stimulate sales.

Du Mont had little experience with the retail public and none with show business, and it showed. He staffed his boardroom with military men--one former admiral regaled everyone who would listen with tales of the epic battles he staged nightly in his bathtub with model ships--and his network with their cronies and kids. He funded his move into television by selling part of his company to Paramount in a disastrously structured deal that gave the penurious studio virtual veto power over his spending.

But Du Mont's real problem was the FCC, long a lackey of the big radio networks, NBC and CBS. (ABC--only recently spun off from NBC, where it had been one of the company's two radio nets--was somewhat less powerful.) Those years were what one FCC commissioner would later recall as "the whorehouse era," when mythic network lobbyists like Scoop Russell and Earl Gammons magisterially strolled Washington hallways, dispensing cash and instructions to their federal minions. The networks were determined to extend their broadcast hegemony into the new medium of television, and they used the FCC as their Praetorian Guard.

The FCC'S target of choice was affiliations. The commission, arguing that television needed to be local, had already capped the number of stations that could be owned outright by any one network at five. Because its partner Paramount owned an independent station in Los Angeles, DuMont could have only four, a 20 percent competitive disadvantage. (Curiously, the Fee's concern for a healthy television industry did not extend to the blatant ways the networks retarded the development of TV. For years there was no television during daylight because CBS, NBG, and ABC didn't want to cut into their daytime radio audiences; only when DuMont began making money with its daytime lineup did the other nets reluctantly join in.)