My former New Horizons colleague Ara Rubyan has an excellent website: Postmodern Politics; you may have seen some of his comments reproduced here. His thoughts on the current Middle East situation, for example, are lucid, well thought out and bear the hallmarks of his indomitable reason. Too bad such qualities are completely wasted on that region.

I do have one corollary to offer to a piece he posted on Tuesday May 14th. Commenting on a Matt Drudge "scoop" that Bill O'Reilly is apparently paying local stations to carry his syndicated radio show, Ara rightly yawned at this non-starter of a story. Unfortunately Ara was drawn into the "no-spin" zone when he riffed on Drudge's comments that this was an "unprecedented" arrangement. Not exactly. The history of radio is far more interesting than that......MORE...

What O'Reilly appears to be doing is far from unprecedented. It was in fact common practice in the earliest days of radio, before national networks came into their own; furthermore, the history of broadcast media is strewn with similar arrangements.

In the 1920s and '30s, a local company might buy up time on a number of regional stations and broadcast their fully-sponsored, self-produced programming. Sponsors would often offset the cost of production by selling commercial time to other companies with whom they might be affiliated or have similar business interests. For example, the Gruesome Casket Company might sell commercial time to the Happy Valley Cemetery.

This arrangement remained in place after the rise of the large radio networks like NBC and CBS in the mid '30's. Jack Benny's famous radio show was entitled the "Jell-O Variety Hour". The term "soap opera" comes directly from the tendency of afternoon dramas to be produced by soap companies like Lux and Palmolive to such an extent that script writers, quite often, also wrote ad copy for the company.

The introduction of a cathode ray appliance into America's living rooms did little to change this practice. Sponsorship practices were transferred sans second thoughts from radio to TV. All the retrospectives following the recent death of Milton Berle featured requisite shots of Uncle Milty in drag, with references to his enormous--um--talent. But they also included no shortage of clips of the quartet known as the Texaco Star Showmen, whose cheery jingle "We're the men from Texaco, we service you from Main to Mexico..." opened every episode, reminding us that there was no "Milton Berle Show" in those halcyon days--it was "The Texaco Star Theater." Likewise, all those cigars sticking out of Ernie Kovacs' craw were provided gratis by his producers/sponsors El Producto and Muriel. (In private he was known to favor pre-Fidel Havanas.)

When the unsung genius of the sit-com, Desi Arnaz, went looking for a sponsor to help him launch I Love Lucy, he turned to Phillip Morris. (A longer essay would be necessary to flesh out Arnaz' impact on what we understand as TV.) Part of the unique deal Arnaz hammered out with the tobacco giant included ownership of all recordings; prior to this the sponsor was the owner of the program, lock stock and barrel. In exchange both Lucille Ball and Arnaz appeared in print and video ads for Phillip Morris without remediation throughout the fifties. (Sadly, both died from conditions exaggerated by their addiction to tobacco. When CBS aired the recent I Love Lucy 50th Anniversary, PM declined to allow use of the original opening featuring an animated Lucy And Ricky sliding down a pack of butts in order to comply with ban on cartoon characters promoting tobacco products.)

In the late 1950's the late Pat Weaver (father of Sigourney) took over as Vice-President of NBC-TV. He promoted a system in which the networks controlled programming, buying shows from independent producers and studios. This has become the dominant business model of the broadcast networks ever since. Originally, this arrangement was hailed as a triumph of artistic integrity over crass commercialism and sponsor interference in content.

Even though most of the so-called Golden Age of Television was almost exclusively a product of sponsor-owned programming, and there are few recorded examples of sponsor interference in content that have survived, some notable exceptions did occur. Probably the most notorious example of sponsor control of content was a Stanley Kramer production of Judgment at Nuremberg, sponsored in the Northeast by the regional gas company. The sponsor attempted to excise all references to the Nazis killing Jews with gas despite producers' insistence that the Nazis did not use natural gas in the death camps. A compromise allowed the cast to detail Nazi atrocities but allowed the sponsor to hit the mute button at every reference to "gas".

The current syndication model was created in the early sixties by the venerable Aaron Spelling. After his Mike Wallace-hosted documentary on the Russian military was rejected by the three broadcast networks as too inflammatory, Spelling spun together a ragtag assemblage of independent stations and sold commercial time to national advertisers at considerably discounted rates--while allowing local stations to also sell time. This was a golden opportunity for local advertisers to have their business and services showcased alongside slickly-produced national campaigns. This model has now dominated both radio and television for forty years.

In the last decade a new form of advertiser-driven content-block programming has arisen: the infomercial. Far from heralding a new "vast wasteland" as some have feared, the infomercial has more in common with the early days of broadcast media. The biggest difference is the lack of entertainment value. Modern infomercials are essentially commercials without shows. The contrived formats purporting to document "amazing discoveries" fool no one above sub-normal. In the past when you tuned into Jack Benny, you knew he was going to pitch Jell-O at you, but at least you were listening to Jack Benny! (And that mofo was funny--and I don't mean in the kitschy hipper-than-thou sense either!)

From what I can discern, the controversy surrounding O'Reilly hinges on the "unprecedented" nature of his arrangement with stations and advertisers. (Media liberals are the real conservatives.) What critics miss is not that this "new" arrangement is unprecedented, but that a time-tested practice has found a new expression. The eternal return...those who fail to remember history...yadda, yadda, yadda. :-)

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Amateur historian and freelance writer Paul Fallon lives in the wilds of Livonia, Michigan. He has a wife, a son, and a truck. He has never been to Paris.