Building news credibility made CBS a political power and brand asset.

Evidence

Bernays also convinced Paley that nothing would burnish the CBS brand so much as building its reputation for news coverage. The old propagandist’s instinct was shrewd indeed. For news would give Paley license to brag to Congress how diligently CBS was covering public affairs, while at the same time having news coverage made it clear that the network had the power to favor or ignore individual politicians, making CBS a political force to be reckoned with. Ultimately CBS created what was the nation’s first broadcast news service to compete credibly with print. Radio news had never really been more than a gesture before the mid-1930s; but on the recommendation of Bernays, Paley hired Ed Klauber, former city editor at The New York Times, giving him all the resources he asked for. Klauber set high standards and made radio news, and the CBS brand in particular, respected. CBS also became the first network to hire its own reporters-hundreds of them. Paley’s commitment revealed either blind luck or prescience, for as the 1930s wore on, and Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini came to power, the news, always a money loser, would suddenly begin drawing millions of listeners.*6 Meanwhile, with its head start and double-barreled broadcasting, NBC would remain ascendant for most of the 1930s. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the propaganda/public-relations thread of Bernays and to how attention economics drove broadcast news investment. — connects to: CBS used a quality-brand strategy to challenge NBC’s ratings dominance. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 442; Paley ran CBS purely to harvest attention with no reformist intent — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 492

Broader Connections

• CBS used a quality-brand strategy to challenge NBC’s ratings dominance. #expands (0.82) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 442
• Paley ran CBS purely to harvest attention with no reformist intent #contradicts (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 492