It's Last Call for The Tiffany Network
In 1950, a battle was underway to determine the standard on which color television broadcasting would be based. The then twenty-two-year-old Columbia Broadcasting System would demonstrate its proposed color TV system, which used a synchronized, spinning mechanical wheel to render the red, green, and blue images atop a television set's picture tube. One of the earliest locations for a display of this technology was the New York City building that housed the Tiffany & Co. jewelry store.
Given that CBS Chairman William S. Paley and his network President Frank Stanton were somewhat obsessed with presenting their network as the “more refined” of the three networks that dominated radio and television broadcasting at the time, the nickname of CBS becoming known as “The Tiffany Network” would likely have been accepted by the two men, if not actively promoted by them. Paley, in particular, was known as a man of great taste in the high-society circles of New York City in those years, having married and then divorced Dorothy Hart Hearst in July of 1947. (She had previously been the wife of John Randolph Hearst of the Hearst newspaper family dynasty.) Paley, a notorious womanizer his entire life, would then marry socialite Barbara Cushing Mortimer (known to all as “Babe”) some four days later.
While CBS’s color TV system would be adopted by the FCC in October 1950, following a decade-long development of the technology, the outbreak of the Korean War would interrupt its full deployment to the public. One weakness of the CBS system for color TV broadcasting was its incompatibility with the many black-and-white sets already in use at the time. By the time the Korean War started winding down, the rival color TV technology that RCA and its NBC network developed would be approved by the FCC and ultimately become the standard for color television in the United States.
But the moniker of “The Tiffany Network” stuck with CBS, which had ridden the post-World War II boom in television to surpass its long-time rival, NBC, which had dominated the radio era of American broadcasting. Though CBS had built a strong reputation for its news coverage during the war and beyond, the network’s first breakout star would emerge in the early 1950s — in the person of one Arthur Godfrey.
Godfrey, who had come from being a popular morning radio host in Washington, DC, would become the most heard and seen figure on CBS radio and television networks in the early 1950s. At his peak, Godfrey was on CBS some six days each week on various programs and brought in millions of dollars in ad revenue for his employer.
Bill Paley privately thought that Godfrey’s homespun appeal was too “low-brow” for his network and pretty much despised Godfrey, who responded by openly criticizing Paley and other CBS executives by name on the air. But given his level of success, Arthur Godfrey would be kept on the air by CBS, with his radio show ending in 1972.
By 1972, CBS was the nation’s most-watched television network, having built itself during the 1960’s on mass-appeal hits such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Petticoat Junction.” It was where Ed Sullivan would introduce various acts to the nation each Sunday night from a Broadway theatre that hosted his “Toast of the Town” variety show, which would ultimately be renamed simply “The Ed Sullivan Show.” It was on that stage, once known as The Hammerstein Theatre, that the nation would be introduced first to Elvis Presley and then to four lads from Liverpool, England, who would call themselves “The Beatles.”
The Broadway location, then known as CBS Studio 50, would be shuttered in 1971, with the end of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” by then the longest-running variety show in American broadcasting history, having aired for some sixteen years. The facility would reopen in 1993, when CBS would hire a young David Letterman away from his late-night show on NBC to become the star of his own 11:30 pm weeknight program: “The Late Show with David Letterman” from the newly refurbished studio, now rechristened as “The Ed Sullivan Theatre.”
When Letterman stepped down as host of “The Late Show” on CBS in 2015, he was succeeded by Stephen Colbert, who would host the program from a revamped “Ed Sullivan Theatre” for the next decade. When “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” ends its run later this week, and the lights go down in the former Studio 50 for the final time, it will also effectively mark the end of “The Tiffany Network.”
Not that Colbert’s departure is the only factor in that ending; this week will also see the shuttering of the CBS Radio network, with the last top-of-the-hour newscast airing late Friday night. The same radio network that William S. Paley’s father, Samuel, would purchase a stake in, along with his business partners, back in 1927, to promote the family’s “La Palina” brand cigar business. Son William proved to be gifted in the nascent field of broadcasting, quickly growing the “Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System” into a major network with over 110 affiliated stations. (The word “Phonographic” was later dropped from the name, leaving it as just the Columbia Broadcasting System, abbreviated as CBS.)
CBS Radio would evolve over the next five decades to ultimately become a network news operation, built on the company’s portfolio of 50,000-watt clear-channel radio stations in major cities across the country. CBS would sell off its group of local radio stations to Entercom (now known as Audacy) in 2017. But the radio news operation, which came to prominence in the late 1930s, leading up to and through World War II, with its on-the-scene coverage transmitted by shortwave relay back to a nation waiting for every update. It was during this time that a young reporter named Edward R. Murrow would become a known voice through his dispatches from the rooftops of London, which were targets of German aerial bombardment.
CBS Radio’s news division would, in turn, lead to CBS News on television, where Murrow would launch his weekly “See It Now” program, which would tackle a wide range of major stories of the day, including the notable confrontation with a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy on his ruinous crusade to purge the nation’s government of the illusory threat of communism.
CBS News would complete its move into television with the launch of “The CBS Evening News” in 1949, the same year that rival NBC would debut “The Camel News Caravan” with anchor John Cameron Swayze. Radio anchor Douglas Edwards first anchored the CBS newscast, and he was replaced by former UPI radio reporter Walter Cronkite in 1962. Cronkite would be at the anchor desk when “The CBS Evening News” became the first network TV newscast to air for a full half-hour each weeknight. He would stay in that post through the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the landing of man on the moon, and the Watergate scandal that brought down U.S. President Richard Nixon.
Cronkite, who would be dubbed “the most trusted man in America,” would step down from the anchor desk after nearly two decades in 1981. He would be succeeded by Dan Rather, the network’s reporter in Dallas at the time of Kennedy’s death in 1963. He would anchor the broadcast for the next 24 years, breaking his predecessor's record. (Including a brief two-year detour when he was forced to share the anchor desk with Connie Chung.) Rather would ultimately be removed from the anchor chair following a controversy surrounding unauthenticated documents questioning the service of President George W. Bush in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. The report, which aired on the network’s 60 Minutes II program, was ultimately discredited and led to the termination of Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, in 2005. Rather would leave CBS News a year later. He was replaced as anchor of the Evening News by veteran CBS News correspondent Bob Schieffer temporarily.
The search for a successor to the dominant years of Cronkite and Rather anchoring “The CBS Evening News” went through Katie Couric, the first woman to solo-anchor a network newscast, then to Scott Pelley for a half-dozen years. Pelley would be relieved of the anchor desk for a role with the network’s 60 Minutes program in 2017, and would be succeeded by Jeff Glor for the next two years. By 2019, it was Norah O’Donnell’s turn to anchor the newscast, which she would do for the next six years. O’Donnell was replaced at the desk by a pair of men, John Dickerson from the network and Maurice DuBois, who came from the local news operation at WCBS-TV in New York City. The duo would last not quite a full year, as CBS's corporate parent, Paramount, would be acquired by David Ellison’s Skydance, and Ellison would install Bari Weiss as Editor-in-Chief of CBS News. Weiss would, in turn, name CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil as the latest person to anchor the CBS Evening News, starting in January of 2026. His initial months in the role have been at the center of a broader controversy surrounding Weiss's moves in the leadership of CBS News.
Those moves include the “repositioning” of the editorial stance of “the house that Murrow built” to allegedly be more appealing to an audience leaning to the right on the country’s political spectrum. Also on the immediate horizon is a highly speculated “retooling” of the news division’s venerable weekly flagship broadcast, “60 Minutes.” The first of those expected changes could follow the show’s 58th season finale, which aired just this past Sunday night.
We expect that, at some point in the future, broadcasting historians will point to this week as the moment when “The Tiffany Network” officially came to a close. Its time of death will be fixed somewhere between the endings of Stephen Colbert’s run with “The Late Show” and CBS News signing off the radio for the last time, alongside whatever “creative destruction” is ahead for both “60 Minutes” and “The CBS Evening News” in the days and weeks to come.
It is a pretty safe bet that William S. Paley wouldn’t recognize the place that he once built into what it has become.
More’s the pity for that. We intend to have a toast on Friday evening in honor of its passing, and invite you to do the same.
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