WCVB-TV Boston: How We Built the Greatest Television Station in America

WCVB-TV Boston: How We Built the Greatest Television Station in America
by Robert M. Bennett (1927-2016)

In this memoir, the highlight of television executive Bob Bennett’s career was launching and growing WCVB-TV, Channel 5 in Boston. A major theme is his commitment to locally-produced programming. Another theme is Bennett’s leadership style, whereby he encouraged new ideas and risk-taking from his lieutenants, and inspired a sense of pride which brought out the best in people at all levels of the organization. It’s also a high-risk, high-reward story that could have turned out very differently.

The book is comprised of Bennett’s recollections interspersed with commentary from former colleagues.

EARLY YEARS. Commercial television broadcasting began in 1947. Bennett’s career in television started a few years later in 1951 at KTTV in Los Angeles. His first role was receiving and organizing the ad reels from advertisers. He later moved up to a sales position.

In 1963, “John Kluge from back east announced that he was buying KTTV from the Los Angeles Times and was going to place the station into his Metromedia Group of stations… One day Al Krivin, who was the president of Metromedia Broadcasting, came to me and said he wanted me to be the general manager for WTTG in Washington, D.C.” In 1969, Bennett was promoted to general manager of WNEW-TV in New York, “a station that was much more set in its ways.”

Bennett was thriving at Metromedia, but he was frustrated with his boss. “He would continue to bother me on a regular basis no matter what I did. He was always coming in to the station complaining about something. His complaints were constant. He was unhappy with anything I did, and certainly would never acknowledge any of my successes. It seemed the more positive press I was getting, the more steamed up Al Krivin would get.”

BOSTON BROADCASTERS. “One day the telephone rang in my office and on the other end of the line was a man by the name of Leo Beranek who was the president of Boston Broadcasters, Inc. (BBI). Leo and BBI had filed an application in March of 1963 to try and acquire the FCC permit to operate a television station in Boston, which was now WHDH-TV and operated by The Herald Traveler Corporation… WHDH applied for a renewal, but in 1969, the FCC denied them the renewal and awarded BBI the permit. Legal wrangling between the Herald Traveler and BBI had been going on for years.”

“‘How much of this station do you own Bob?’ he asked me… ‘What we’re talking about is putting five percent ownership of the station in Boston in your name, Bob.’”

“Later I had my final meeting with John Kluge… He then wanted to know what Krivin had given me as severance pay for my nineteen and a half years at Metromedia. ‘John, all Al gave me was my accrued vacation pay. That’s it.’ … John frowned. ‘Bob, I’m going to give you a whole year’s salary, and I wish you the best of luck. But I want you to remember something: if that station ever comes up for sale; you let me know because I want to be the first one standing in line to buy it.’”

BATTLE FOR THE FCC LICENSE. “At the time I accepted the job, the legal battle for WHDH, which had been going on since 1957, was now reaching new heights of animosity and rage.”

“In 1958, the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight was looking into allegations that the FCC’s television hearings were being corrupted by ex parte (meaning out of the presence of other parties) contacts with Commissioners by applicants or their representatives… During these Congressional hearings, it was revealed that several such contacts had taken place involving Channel 5 in Boston.”

“One of the major issues up before the FCC was the issue of Robert Choate, who was then President of The Herald Traveler Corporation, having lunch with FCC Chairman, George McConnaughey, not only once, but twice, the second time of which he brought along his attorney. An issue in the hearing before the Commission was the comparative weight to be accorded to the combination of the newspaper and television station. Choate and his lawyer presented McConnaughey with a draft amendment to Congressional legislation which would remove newspaper ownership as a comparative factor. As this dealt with a significant aspect of the case then pending before the Commission, this was considered an improper ex parte discussion… Because of these contacts the U.S. Court of Appeals remanded the entire proceedings back to the FCC to look into the matter.”

Later, Herald-Traveler publisher Harold Clancy admitted that the newspaper could not survive without the profits of the television station.

“Meanwhile, we were convinced that our phones were tapped. To prove it, we fed phony stories into the phone lines and sure enough, they would pop up in the newspaper and various other places. Clancy assigned a squad of reporters to dig up information on all of us. Our attorneys were telling us not to step out of line under any circumstances. ‘Do not talk to anyone. Do not put yourself in a situation that could jeopardize our ability to get that license. Everyone keep your mouths shut, please!’ Benny Gaguine would say to us.”

“We could not apply for the license until construction of the station was completed, which was scheduled for some time in September… We were building a television station from the ground up out of an old Caterpillar tractor warehouse we had optioned in Needham, Massachusetts, which was to be our headquarters.”

“As our building progressed and we moved closer to our hoped-for starting date, I hired several good friends and colleagues to come and work with me. These great people gave up their jobs, arrived in Boston, and then found themselves living in an atmosphere of uncertainty. All of them had put up money to buy their shares of BBI stock. If there was a call for a million dollars, and you owned five percent of that, you had to come up with $50,000.”

“We had a burn rate of almost $300,000 per month, which meant that our $4 million loan from the bank would soon be gone… Our severe cash bind had now forced us up against a wall. If the vote went against us, bankruptcy was inevitable for the company and for a lot of us individually.”

“The Supreme Court refused to review the case and now it was up to the Commission to act. They were the only ones who could set a termination date for WHDH.”

“In early March of 1972, the Commission voted four to one to put WHDH off the air on March 19^th at 3:00 a.m… We had finally won. Armed police guards were placed around our studio in Needham, in anticipation of a possible bomb being planted by someone who didn’t take kindly to the final ruling.”

ON THE AIR. “On Sunday, March 19, 1972 at 3:05 a.m., WCVB-TV signed on with two words: ‘Hello world,’ followed by a brief introduction by Matthew Brown and Leo Beranek and then a thirty-minute program describing BBI’s plans for Channel 5. We then left our call letters on the screen until our first broadcasting day began that morning at 6:58 a.m.”

NETWORK AFFILIATION. “My first real challenge was to find an affiliation with a network. WHDH-TV had been a CBS affiliate and we would have liked to have kept the CBS affiliation. However, CBS had jumped ship because they were scared of the massive amount of local broadcasting that we had promised the FCC. They no doubt envisioned us preempting a big part of their network schedule in favor of our local programming… They weren’t wrong in thinking that.”

“We learned that ABC was considering the purchase of one of the other stations in Boston, and bypassing WCVB-TV. I couldn’t let this happen… Leo and I went down to New York City to visit ABC and their affiliate committee to try and persuade them to let us be their Boston affiliate. We had given them our programming schedule and I could see it scared them… I believe the end result of that meeting only made them more interested in buying a station in Boston if they could find one for sale. The general feeling we believed when we walked out of that meeting was that they believed WCVB-TV would preempt ABC all over the place and negatively affect their ratings.”

“Our problem was that as an independent station with no network affiliation, we would have had to purchase a lot of programming and that would be very costly… If we were affiliated with a network like ABC, they would have supplied daytime and late-night programming and saved us a lot of programming expenses.”

“I got so mad over the whole non-commitment from ABC that I immediately went over to the phone and called my friend Elton Rule who was the president of ABC. ‘We would like to be affiliated with ABC because we feel we’d make a great team together… ABC is going to be hard-pressed to beat us… If you say no, I will declare my independence with the press today and tell them that I’ve done everything in my power to bring ABC to channel five in Boston… In effect, I’m declaring my independence right now unless I hear from you in five minutes.’ ‘Bob, I’ll call you back in five minutes,’ I heard him say… Exactly five minutes later the telephone rang. It was Elton. ‘You’ve got a deal, Bob. We’re in.’”

NEWS. “I always felt that news made your reputation and set the tone for the station.”

“In 1971, Tom Ellis was the news anchor on the Westinghouse station in Boston that was dominating the market in news. He was a good-looking Texan who had a strong delivery, a great smile, and looked almost like an actor in the way he carried himself on camera. Viewers seemed to like him… Since he was doing so well in the ratings, he was transferred to New York and bombed… I decided to offer Ellis the job at WCVB and he accepted. In 1975, we put him on the air with Natalie and our ratings went through the roof… Natalie did not like working with Tom… Members of the BBI board were no fans of Tom Ellis. They thought he was too Hollywood in some ways and did not fit the conservative New England image they had in mind. They were happier with Hynes and Henning.”

“Two and a half years into Tom Ellis’s three-year contract, he now had an agent and he demanded more money. I had several meetings with his agent, and then had to leave to go on a trip to California. Before I left, I asked his agent for his word that Tom Ellis would not leave his job at WCVB until we reached, or didn’t reach, a final agreement. He said to me, ‘Bob, you have my word.’”

“When I returned from my California trip, I was driving out of the Sumner Tunnel listening to the radio when I heard the following news lead: ‘Big news in Boston today—Tom Ellis leaving WCVB-TV Channel 5 for Channel 7.’ I was so mad I almost drove the car off the road. I immediately called his agent and demanded an explanation. ‘Bob, what can I tell you? It’s true,’ he told me. ‘But I want you to know I’m no longer representing Tom Ellis. I don’t want to have a client who is so disloyal and dishonest, so I’ve quit.’”

“At Channel 7, much to my happiness, he bombed.”

“Natalie Jacobson had magic dust all over her. She was a real natural television personality and it registered on camera, and the viewers loved her. I teamed Chet and Natlie up on the news set and they became an extraordinary news team and our ratings began to soar. Sometime later they were married and they became the first husband-wife news team in New England. Our public relations people capitalized on it and our ratings continued to go higher and higher. Natalie held this co-anchor and the anchor position from 1972 until 2007, when she retired.”

Jacobson writes: “There is no way to remember the halcyon days of news at WCVB-TV without saluting the leadership of [news director] Jim Thistle.”

CHRONICLE. “I like to believe that WCVB-TV was first and foremost about people, and in my opinion, we had assembled one really great team of professionals—articulate, talented, focused, and hungry to try new things.”

“Phil Balboni came to WCVB in August of 1972. He was smart, creative, energetic, and eager to learn. He was hired by Leo as our first Editorial Director… He created such memorable programs as Five on Five and Calendar, but he was most instrumental in bringing to my attention an idea for a program called Chronicle.”

Phil Balboni writes: “The record should show that Bob was not an easy sell on this. He made me work as hard as I knew how to back up my projections, financial and otherwise… The sales department had to sell ads in this new program and it was unenthusiastic at best, downright hostile at times. And then there was the proposed budget: $1 million a year and some 30 people, which was a great deal of money in 1982… He had to stand up to his close colleagues in sales and programming. He had to justify that enormous expense to the board of directors of the station.”

“Chronicle was aired in the 7:30 to 8:00 prime time frame, and to our surprise it did not do so well in the ratings. Each show dealt with several compelling issues per segment, so it may have been that viewers were finding the show somewhat confusing.”

“In 1982, Phil went on to become Director of News and Paul LaCamera took over as Executive Producer of Chronicle. Paul fiddled a bit with the program structure and changed it to one segment per program. The program then took off in the ratings and it was unstoppable. It beat everything in that time slot and is still on today, giving competitors a ‘ratings’ run for their money. When Hearst bought WCVB-TV some years later, they syndicated Chronicle and it was a hit across the country.”

MORE LOCAL PROGRAMS. WCVB productions included a program about medical topics called House Call with Dr. Timothy Johnson, a program on legal topics called Miller’s Court, a Spanish-language program called Aquí, and “Candlepin Bowling, which was one of our highest rated locally-produced programs.”

“In 1980, we went on the air with a situation comedy called Park Street Under. This was a first since no television station had ever produced a sitcom… The main character in the series is a bartender who was an ex-Boston Red Sox pitcher… Not long thereafter, two people left ABC’s program development department and went into the programming department at NBC. The following season, Cheers came out on the NBC program line up. Cheers was a program about an ex-baseball pitcher who worked in a bar in Boston… Sound familiar?”

WCVB even produced a feature film. “Summer Solstice was the last picture Henry Fonda made… There was a great deal of yelling and screaming, with everyone hustling and bustling and pickup up and moving things, that Fonda said to me, ‘What the hell is all that about?’ I turned to him and out came the words, ‘I think that what you are seeing Mr. Fonda is enthusiasm.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You know something, you might be right. I haven’t seen real enthusiasm in over fifty years.’”

SALES. Josh McGraw, Local Sales Manager writes: “In 1979, I was making a sales call with my sales manager, Mike Volpe. We were pitching the buyer that controlled the largest account in Boston and they were spending about $3 million with us on WCVB alone. In my package of specifically tailored programming, I created for the buyer’s account an upcoming buy with several locally produced programs. The buyer quickly informed me that they did not want to buy any locally produced ‘crap’ as shell called it. I turned to Mike and I had never seen him so angry before. Mike told her straight out that he never wanted to hear her talk negatively about WCVB’s locally produced programming ever again. If she did, he would have a conversation with her media director and the president of the agency and consequences then may be that WCVB would become unavailable for her clients to buy. Part of me was concerned that we may have just lost our biggest account, but the other part of me was incredibly proud of the stance Mike took, and on that day he demonstrated to me just how important local programming was to the station’s position in the Boston market.”

CNN. “CNN at this time was getting a lot of press, both positive and negative, and cable was starting to gain a foothold in homes across the country. The idea of 24-hour news intrigued me, so one day I called Ted Turner and introduced myself.”

“‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Ted. If you ever get your CNN News idea off the ground, I’ll give you my six o’clock news every day for you to use. You won’t have to have a New England base, since we’ll supply you with that. The only thing you’ll have to pay for is the upgrade of the talent.’ ‘Well why would you do that?’ ‘Because I believe anybody as crazy as you can use a little help. I respect what you’re doing and I want to help you. I happen to believe that a guy like you could use a few friends. I’ve tried to do a lot of crazy things in my time and I’ve always needed friends around me to help me. I want to be a friend and help you out.’ ‘What do you want in return?’ ‘Simple. If you get CNN on the air, then the only thing I want is the exclusive rights to CNN in New England.’”

“In the Boston papers, WCVB then announced that we had the ability now to cover any story in the world and we would be doing it live. We had CNN international, ABC national, and WCVB local, which made us the single most important source for news in New England… I then convinced Metromedia to join us, and they then came in with Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and other markets.”

“Sometime later, Westinghouse joined ABC in launching a new 24-7 news network to be called the Satellite News Network to compete with CNN,” but this never got off the ground.

ABC. “WCVB’s big money came at the end of the second year as our advertising revenues began to soar. I remember clearly that when we had started with ABC they were not a strong network. Two to three years into our ownership, ABC was picking up steam and we were really benefitting from it.”

Dick O’Leary writes: “Years later, when Elton Rule retired, the subsequent corporate execs presided over the sharp decline of ABC’s fortunes and were forced to sell the company to Cap Cities Television [in 1985]. As good of corporate managers as they were at Cap Cities, they were not able to totally stem the decline. ABC was then sold to Disney [in 1996].”

SYNDICATION. There is a Commander McBragg moment in this book. Paul Rich, then Executive Vice President/CEO, BBI Communications (1976-1982) writes: “I came up with the idea of creating our own syndication company whereby we would license the station’s award-winning programs to other stations around the country… It was the first time in the history of broadcasting that a local television station became the source of creating and producing syndicated programs, not only in the U.S. but on TV stations and networks around the world.”

Rich’s claim ignores channel 5’s neighbor on the Boston broadcast spectrum, WGBH, channel 2, which was syndicating locally-produced programming twelve years before WCVB existed. WGBH’s first nationally distributed program was A Time To Dance, which began nationwide broadcasts via National Educational Television (NET) in 1960. Another WGBH production, The French Chef hosted by Julia Child, was distributed by NET from 1963 to 1966 and by PBS from 1970 to 1973. The first season of Zoom aired nationally in 1972. These were followed by Crockett’s Victory Garden (from 1975) and This Old House (from 1979).

BBI DIVERSTITURE. “In 1981, the BBI board started to think about selling WCVB. Many of them, who were around 65 years of age when we received the license, were now 75 and older and were starting to think about their estate planning needs.”

Recall when Bennett left WNEW, John Kluge expressed interest in acquiring WCVB if it ever went up for sale. Indeed, this foreshadowed Metromedia’s acquisition of the station in 1982. “The sale of WCVB for $220 million made television history and made millionaires out of 45 people.”

BACK AT METROMEDIA. Kluge promoted Bennett to President of Metromedia Broadcasting. One of his initiatives was to construct a state-of-the art soundstage (Studio C) to expand WCVB’s capabilities for producing local programming.

Metromedia’s other stations had no network affiliation, and their costs to acquire syndicated programming were substantial. Bennett was in talks with three other groups of independent stations—Hearst, Gannett, and Taft—about forming consortium to act as a fourth network. Together with Metromedia, they covered 65% of the United States, which would presumably be of interest to national advertisers.

Before this came to fruition, Metromedia was sold off. In 1986, Hearst bought WCVB for $450 million. In the same year, Fox bought the remaining Metromedia stations for $2 billion; this became the basis for the Fox Network.

I suspect that Bennett’s recollections are oral histories transcribed by the co-author. This would explain some minor inconsistencies and vague timelines, such as “around that time.” It might also explain why Jim Thistle’s name is misspelled in Bennett’s story, but spelled correctly in Natalie Jacobson’s contribution. Overall, this book provides a very interesting insider perspective on the history of the television business.

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Bennett, Robert M., and Dennis Richard. WCVB-TV Boston: How We Built the Greatest Television Station in America. Dunham Books, 2013. Buy from Amazon.com

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Books mentioned:

Riding the Waves: A Life in Sound, Science, and Industry by Leo Beranek (2008)

The Hundred Million Dollar Lunch: The Broadcasting Industry’s Own Watergate by Sterling Quinlan (1974)

Me and Ted Against the World: The Unauthorized Story of the Founding of CNN by Reese Schonfeld (2001)

Related Reading:

The Business of Television, 2nd Edition by Ken Basin (2024)

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