CBS

The chain of stations that became the Columbia Broadcasting System was nearly bankrupt within a year of its 1927 launch, badly outmatched by the RCA-backed network already dominating radio. William S. Paley, the twenty-six-year-old son of a Philadelphia cigar manufacturer whose family had advertised on it, bought control in 1928 and ran the company for the next half-century. His insight was to give affiliates network programming free in exchange for airtime, which built him a national chain faster than his rival could buy one.

What distinguished CBS was that Paley spent money on news when there was no obvious business reason to. Edward R. Murrow, sent to Europe in 1937 as a manager rather than a reporter, began broadcasting live from London rooftops during the Blitz, describing bombers overhead and fires on the skyline to American listeners still arguing about neutrality. He assembled the correspondents remembered as the Murrow Boys, and radio news stopped being a bulletin service read from wire copy and became reporting with a voice and a place.

The confrontation that fixed Murrow's reputation came on television. On March 9, 1954, the program See It Now devoted a half hour to Senator Joseph McCarthy, built almost entirely from film of McCarthy's own statements, and closed with Murrow saying that the fault was not in our stars but in ourselves. Historians generally caution that the broadcast did not bring McCarthy down on its own — the Army-McCarthy hearings and a Senate censure that December did more — but it demonstrated that a network was willing to take the risk.

Walter Cronkite anchored the CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981, broke the news of Kennedy's death, narrated the moon landing, and returned from Vietnam in 1968 to tell viewers on air that the war looked like a stalemate. Polls of the period called him the most trusted man in America. The network's programming standards and design earned it the nickname the Tiffany Network, and its news division became the model against which American broadcast journalism measured itself — an authority that eroded as the audience fragmented across cable and, later, the internet.