Looking Back in 5,713 Words and 115 Links

Even with political dollars pouring in the door, TV broadcasters knew early on that 2008 would not finish well. Spending by other big advertising categories steadily eroded throughout the year as the country slipped into a full-blown recession.

When it came to revenue, flat was the new up.

In December, research firm BIAfn estimated that when all was tabulated TV station revenue would sink 7 percent in 2008 to $20.1 billion, the lowest in seven years.

The decline in core advertising was led by the category that TV stations have come to rely on for as much as 40 percent of their revenue — automotive.

As car sales plummeted in the face of rising gas prices and tightening credit, so did the dollars the auto makers and dealers routinely spent on TV advertising.

By year’s end, most broadcasters were rooting for some kind of government bail out for the Big 3 domestic auto companies, fearing what the loss of their marketing dollars would mean to them in 2009 and beyond.

To the relief of broadcasters, the Bush administration came to the rescue of the U.S. auto industry on Dec. 19, offering $17.4 billion in emergency loans in exchange for concessions from the deeply troubled carmakers and their workers.

What made the dour news of 2008 especially hard to take was that it was prelude to 2009, a down year in the industry’s two-year, up-down revenue cycle that would be without heavy political spending and the extra advertising demand around the Olympics. Core advertising would stand alone.

In November, the Television Bureau of Advertising confirmed the worst when it reissued its forecast for 2009 in the face of the rapidly deteriorating economy. Instead of a 2-5 percent decrease next year, TVB said revenue would drop at twice that rate, 7-11 percent. BIAfn pegged the 2009 decline at 8.5 percent.

“It’s ugly because there is not a real sense that we’re at bottom,” said longtime industry securities analyst Bishop Cheen in assessing the business in July. “It’s always scariest, whether you’re in the TV business or the doughnut business, if you feel things sliding and you don’t have a firm conviction of where bottom is.”

Wall Street crushed the stock prices of all old media companies, especially those of the pure-play TV station groups. Many are selling today for a fraction of what they were a year ago. In December 2007, a share of LIN TV cost $12.95. This morning, you could buy single shares of LIN, Sinclair, Scripps, Nexstar, Young, Gray, Extravision, Belo, Journal and Acme for that and still get change.

Adding to the angst of most broadcasters was the feeling that broadcast programming itself was unraveling at an accelerating pace. The ratings of all three types of broadcast programming — network, syndicated and local — dropped as the Internet joined cable in atomizing the TV audience (see Programming below).

Seeing where things were heading, most station groups did not wait to cutting costs, particularly headcount. No department within the stations was immune. Producers, reporters, account executives and engineers all paid the price for the top-line shortfalls.

Management also began to cut loose high-priced veteran anchors, concluding that their fat salaries no longer made sense in the new economy of broadcasting (see Journalism below).

Organizers of trade shows and vendors of station hardware and software were also feeling the pinch. The former planned for smaller crowds; the latter, for less capEx spending.

Stations’ financial troubles slowed the rollout of local HD news in 2008 and they will probably continue to do so next year. According to Television Broadcast magazine, as of July, 126 stations in 65 markets were in the HD news business.

More Business

The station trading market ground to a halt in 2008 due to the lack of credit and the near collapse of the financial markets. There was little equity and virtually no debt chasing TV stations.

The year’s two biggest deals failed to close.

Just yesterday, Post-Newsweek Stations walked away from its deal to purchase WTVJ Miami from NBC Local Media for $205 million — a price for a network affiliate in a top 25 market that would have been unheard of even five years ago.

In the joint statement, Post-Newsweek and NBC cited “the current economic environment” and regulatory delay for the decision.

Post-Newsweek had planned to operate WTVJ in tandem with its ABC affiliate in the market, WPLG.

It may have been a bigger setback for NBC, which had also hoped to sell its O&O in Hartford, Conn., WVIT. But it quietly pulled it off the market earlier this year after failing to attract any buyers.

It was essentially the same story for Bonten Media and Landmark Communications.

Bonten, headed by Randy Bongarten and backed by the Diamond Castle equity fund, told Landmark in October that it would not be able to follow through with its $209 million purchase of WTVF Nashville because its financing had dried up. The lead financier on the deal: the ill-fated Lehman Bros.

Landmark, which wanted to exit the broadcasting business, never even found a buyer for its only other station, KLAS Las Vegas. The mini-group will have to suffer through 2009 along with its industry peers.

Last year’s big deal was investor Sam Zell’s $8.2 billion, highly leveraged acquisition of Tribune Co., a major newspaper publisher and TV broadcaster — a move that took the company private.

But Zell had badly miscalculated. He was unable to sell assets to buy down debt as planned because of the credit market and he would unable to pump enough cash out of the newspapers and TV stations because of the recession-triggered advertising slump.

To buy more time, Tribune filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month, reporting $13 billion in debt and $7.6 million is assets.

And Tribune was not the only one to run for bankruptcy cover.

Pappas Telecasting, the radio-TV group cobbled together over decades by Harry Pappas, went Chapter 11 in May. It appears that most of Pappas’ stations will end up in the hands of lead creditor, Fortress Credit, which hired broadcast veterans Bert Ellis and Dan Sullivan to manage the stations. It is, in essence, buying 10 full-power stations for $260 million.

Other casualties include Equity Media Holdings Corp. and Multicultural Television Broadcasting. Unhappy creditors are now pushing Equity toward liquidation. After defaulting on its loans, Multicultural had to put the five major-market stations it purchased from Scripps in 2005 into a trust, which intends to sell them off for the benefit of the creditors.

New Revenue Streams

So, was there any good news in 2008 for broadcasting?

You betcha.

After years of struggle, most broadcasters with Big 4 network affiliates found that they could negotiate with local cable operator for retransmission consent payments with a strong chance of success. However, as Belo, LIN and other demonstrated, stations have to be willing to tell recalcitrant cable systems to drop their signals and suffer the temporary loss of ratings.

The retrans fees are nowhere near what ESPN and some of the other major cable networks get from operators, but they are substantial, perhaps 20-25 cents per sub per month, and can have a big impact on the financial health of a station group.

Take Nexstar Broadcast Group. According to CEO Perry Sook, the station group earned $20 million in retrans fees this year and expects $30 million in 2010. Not bad for a company with total revenue around $275 million.

Having spent heavily for new digital broadcasting facilities in advance of the analog cut-off next February (see DTV below), broadcasters are beginning to see how they might earn a return on the investment.

A bevy of new networks is seeking carriage on stations’ digital subchannels, promising a new source of revenue at little cost. The so-called diginets include LATV, .2, RTN, Mexicanal and MGM’s This TV.

But diginet business is far from proven, however. In October, NBC announced that it was shutting down NBC Weather Plus, the four-year-old digital joint venture between NBC and affiliated local stations, which programmed the 24/7 local weather service on their digital channels. The service was one of the first digital projects conceived as a way for a network and its affiliates to work together to create new revenue streams.

BET founder Bob Johnson got in the act in November, proposing to create a black-oriented diginet with Ion Media principally for carriage on Ion stations in 42 markets. To insure carriage also on cable systems, Johnson and Ion have asked the FCC to “share” the Ion licenses.

Sezmi simply wants to lease extra digital spectrum from broadcasters so that it can launch a subscription-supported wireless cable service featuring VOD and 35-40 cable networks. In technical trials, the startup has been working with Tribune, Fisher and Daystar.

A growing list of broadcasters believe that the best use of spare digital spectrum may be mobile broadcasting. The Open Mobile Video Coalition, comprising most of the top station groups, made substantial progress toward its goals of setting a mobile standard and spurring development of businesses around the standard.

BIAfn, in a report commissioned by the NAB, said that mobile broadcasting could generate $2 billion in revenue for broadcasters by 2012.

Top Management

The churn among top station group managers was no greater than usual 2008, even though it is likely that few made their numbers.

In November, Cox Television’s Andy Fisher announced his retirement, triggering a corporate restructuring that placed top newspaper exec Sandy Schwartz in charge of TV and radio as well.

Also in November, Bill Peterson said he would be retiring as head of the Scripps TV station group at the end of the year. His successor: Brian Lawlor, a 20-year industry veteran who has been head of sales for the group.

The other major retirement was that of Edward Quinn of McGraw-Hill Broadcasting in July. He was replaced by Darrell Brown, who had been GM at KMGH Denver.

After Belo Corp. split its company is two, one for newspapers and one for broadcasting, Dunia Shive emerged as head of the latter.

Washington

At the year winds to a close, broadcasters’ Washington lobbyists are abuzz with speculation about what the new Obama administration means to the industry (most expect another does of regulation and tighter ownership restrictions) and who would succeed the outgoing Kevin Martin as chairman of the FCC.

Candidates for Martin’s seat include veterans of the Reed Hundt- and Bill Kennard-led FCCs during the Clinton years: Julius Genachowski, Scott Harris, Don Gips, Larry Strickling, Blair Levin and Karen Kornbluh.

Few in broadcasting will miss Kevin Martin. For reasons still not entirely clear, Martin decided last year to include broadcasting in a regulatory agenda that reversed the prevailing philosophy of at least Republican commissioners for the past 30 years. And he carried that thinking into his actions this year.

Reagan-era FCC Chairman Mark Fowler and old-school Republican were critical of Martin’s heavy hand not only in broadcasting, but also in cable. “This is as regulatory a commission as we’ve seen in a quarter century — kidvid, indecency, now the ascertainment redo and looming local program mandates,” Fowler told TVNewsCheck.

Broadcasters lost two big regulatory battles during the year.

Over their objections, the FCC approved the $3.3 billion merger of Sirius and XM, the rival satellite operators that threaten AM and FM. But it may prove to be Pyrrhic victory for Sirius/XM CEO Mel Karmazin. Selling the merger to Washington cost a fortune just as sales of the service began to roll off. At year’s end, the stock has fallen to just pennies.

The other big setback for the industry came in November when the FCC voted to permit sharing of the broadcast spectrum by unlicensed wireless computer devices, despite broadcasters’ vociferous warnings the devices would interfere with their digital signals.

The so-called white spaces proceeding also signaled the ascendancy of the computer lobby in FCC politics. Led by Google and Microsoft, the computer lobby demonstrated that it is force at least as powerful as the once highly touted broadcasting lobby.

But the big battle for broadcasters in yet to come. The cable lobby is expected to make a big push next year to weaken the retransmission consent rights of broadcasters, a move that could erase revenue that station groups have already figured into future budgets.

The DTV Transition

In early 2006, Congress set Feb. 18, 2009, for the final switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting. But the deadline did not seem to take on real meaning until last Sept. 8 when Wilmington, N.C., flipped the switch to digital in an FCC-sanctioned trial.

The trail, involving all the markets commercial stations, showed that despite high awareness levels many viewers had not prepared for the switch or thought they had, but were having trouble with their converter boxes and antennas.

The number of phone calls to local and FCC phone banks in DMA 135 was not large, about 1,500. But when that number is extrapolated to the entire nation with at least 14 million over-the-air-only homes, it becomes clear that millions may be searching for answers on the morning of Feb. 18.

Recognizing the potential for mass confusion (and a possible embarrassment) for the infant Obama administration, Obama transition team members have been meeting with broadcasting and cable reps in Washington to come up with a plan for call centers that can handle the anticipated flood of calls.

At the prompting of the Obama team, the NAB stepped up in December, promising to set up a toll-free number and a national automated call center that would direct questions and complaints to other manned call centers run by cable operators, TV stations, state broadcast associations and the FCC.

Led by the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, cable operators (who know something about phone centers) are expected to take a major role in fielding calls, but they had not yet said what that will be.

Congress tried to help by granting the FCC an extra $20 million for its DTV awareness efforts.

The FCC has not provided a full accounting of the how it is spending the extra funds, but it said it set aside $350,000 to sponsor NASCAR driver David Gilliland. His car No. 38 crashed in its first race with the DTV messaging, which cynics immediately held up as a metaphor for the entire DTV transition effort.

Congress also granted TV stations permission to continue broadcasting a analog signal for 30 days beyond Feb. 18 for the sole purpose of airing information about the transition. The NAB said it would create a 5-8 minute video that stations could loop during the 30 days. It will explain DTV and point viewers toward help.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration worked all year to distribute one or two $40 discount coupons to homes that wanted to buy D-to-A converter boxes so that they could continue to use their old analog sets to watch TV off air after the transition.

On Dec. 17, NTIA said that to date 22 million homes had requested more than 41 million coupons and that nearly 17 million coupons had been redeemed. And of the 14.3 homes that rely solely on off-air TV reception, 11 million had requested coupons.

Money for the coupon problem comes from the $19 billion the government raised in auctioning off broadcast spectrum that is being freed up in the shift to more efficient digital broadcasting.

Programming

The year is ending as it began: with the possibility of a strike looming. This time it’s the Screen Actors Guild that’s threatening. But as the year drew to a close, the guild was split. With the economy reeling, many top performers were showing little appetite for another clash with the studios.

On Feb. 12 the Writers Guild of America voted to end its devastating, three-month strike that brought the entertainment industry to a standstill. ”At the end of the day, everybody won,” said Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp. “It was a fair deal and one that the companies can live with, and it recognizes the large contribution that writers have made to the industry.”

Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said on Jan. 22 the broadcaster was moving to save as much as $50 million a year by reducing its reliance on expensive pilots of new series on the NBC network.

The CW announced in March that it was combining its drama and current programming departments and eliminating its comedy division. In what was described as a companywide restructuring, the network laid off 25-30 employees.

In March, John Nogawski succeeded the late Roger King as president of CBS Television Distribution, while Robert Madden was given the newly created post of senior executive vice president of the syndication company.

In April it was revealed that Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions was developing a talk show featuring Dr. Mehmet Oz for an expected fall 2009 launch. Winfrey and her team met with potential distributors in Chicago, following the same thorough development process Harpo underwent when launching The Oprah Winfrey Show spinoff Dr. Phil in 2002.

Ratings were down for the hit shows that returned to action in April for the first time since the writers strike, and they were also off for some established reality shows that have been unable to take advantage of softer competition. That list includes Fox’s American Idol, whose year-to-year declines have accelerated of late.

Marred in double-digit ratings declines in May, the broadcast nets couldn’t wait for the strike-affected 2007-08 season to be over. But they were also eager to get a fresh start with the 2008-09 season sooner than expected.

The May sweeps painted a picture of viewers out of sync with broadcast television: Shows across multiple networks rang up series lows during a time that historically lures in viewers. On average, the networks are off by 10% from last year in total viewers and off 17% in the 18-49 demo.

In an attempt to focus on boosting programming on other nights, in May CW farmed out its Sunday night lineup to Media Rights Capital to program. But after an otherwise surprisingly solid fall, effective Nov. 30 the CW dropped the plan and took back the night, which was performing “below expectations,” CW said.

This fall must have seemed like old times to Lorne Michaels and the gang at NBC’s Saturday Night Live. With Tina Fey’s guest appearances as Sarah Palin giving the show new viewers and nationwide buzz, the show set a 14-year ratings record on Oct. 18 when the real Palin was a guest. It averaged a 10.7 rating/24 share in 56 Nielsen metered markets.

In September, AMC’s Mad Men became the first basic cable original series to win a best drama award at the 60th annual Primetime Emmy Awards. NBC’s comedy 30 Rock also won big, nabbing four trophies.

This year’s November sweeps ratings period, buffeted by economic upheaval, saw ABC and CBS on top in adults 18-49 and total viewers, respectively. Only smaller networks CW and MNT avoided audience erosion in their target demographics.

Part of the problem may be the lack of success of most of the year’s new shows. Through nine weeks of the season-Sept. 22 through Nov. 23-new broadcast shows among the four big networks have averaged a 2.2 live-plus-same-day program rating among 18-49 viewers. This is down from a 2.7 in 2007, and almost a full rating point under the 3.1 of 2006.

In December, NBC hoped it was killing two birds with one stone by signing Jay Leno to a 10 p.m. weekday show beginning next fall. The move was designed to both keep Leno at the network after he relinquished his Tonight Show desk to Conan O’Brien and at the same time reduce the network’s programming expenses dramatically.

The announcement came just days after NBCU chief Jeff Zucker said he was looking at “all options” to revamp its broadcast model, including possibly cutting the number of primetime hours or even nights per week.

The industry is hoping the syndication business will get a ratings boost next fall from a new round of syndicated shows with big names or big names behind them, like Dr. Oz from Oprah Winfrey and Wendy Williams, which had a test run over the summer and has already lined up stations covering nearly three-fourths the national TV audience.

Other first-run syndication projects slotted for 2009 include a T.D. Jakes talker from CBS, a George Lopez vehicle from Warner Bros. as well as a Marie Osmond show from Program Partners.

Of the crop of new syndies that debuted in 2008, NBCU’s Deal or No Deal and CBS Television Distribution’s The Doctors, were standouts.

TV News

Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights since becoming moderator of Meet the Press nearly 17 years earlier, died June 14 after collapsing at the Washington bureau of NBC News. He was 58. His death left NBC with a critical void that it filled in the short term with Tom Brokaw and then, in December, the network named David Gregory to host Meet the Press.

Layoffs at stations across the country resulted in many longtime anchors, reporters and other news staffers out of jobs. In addition, many stations began eliminating newscasts with low or marginal ratings.

Hearst-Argyle Television’s senior vice president of news, Fred Young, says that the Web is not only providing another outlet for stations, but changing the way it is being produced and the urgency with which it is distributed. And the day of the star-driven newscast is coming to an end.

Later in the year Young announced that he was retiring at the end of the year, concluding a distinguished 46-year career with the station group.

John Wallace, the president of NBC Universal’s Local Media Division, believes the way his flagship WNBC New York can survive the “perfect storm” facing local news is to focus on both journalism and aggregation and to do so on multiple platforms.

The flip side is that as TV news pares back, those left are being asked to do more and the importance of “backpack journalists,” “mo-jos” (mobile journalists), “multimedia journalists,” “VJs” (videojournalists) or “one-man bands” is growing.

Another result of the increased scrutiny station groups began applying to their expenses, was the creation by the NBC and Fox station groups of Local News Service. The masterminds behind it, Fox’s Jack Abernethy and NBC’s John Wallace, think that working together to cover routine events with one independent crew will improve each station’s journalism as well as their bottom lines.

Throughout the year, more and more stations added HD newscasts, many in anticipation of the digital transition next February. However, the growing economic crisis is likely to mean TV stations, especially those in smaller markets, may wait longer to make the transition to high-def local newsgathering.

One group of journalists that was breathing a little easier in December was the staff of ABC’s Nightline. Before NBC announced that it was giving Jay Leno the 10 p.m. weekday slot next year when he leaves the Tonight Show, speculation had been rampant that he would move to ABC, kicking Nightline out.

The TV community was shocked and saddened when popular KATV Little Rock, Ark., anchor Anne Pressly, 26, was found severely beaten in her home in October. She died five days later. A few weeks later, a man accused of the crime was apprehended an hour-and-a-half after local stations aired a picture of him.

In November, disgraced former KYW Philadelphia anchor Larry Mendte was sentenced to serve six months of house arrest for his guilty plea to reading the e-mails of former co-anchor Alycia Lane and feeding the details to newspaper gossip columnists.

After a long journalistic career, including running the Radio-Television News Directors Association for the past 12 years, Barbara Cochran announced she would retire in June 2009.

Another woman in news and in the news was CBS anchor Katie Couric whose interviews with Republican Vice President candidate Sarah Palin were the watercooler talk of the nation in September. And just this week, Couric and her broadcast got more good news with the Nielsen report that the average of 7.4 million people who watched her newscast last week was better than any than any week since February 2007.

Advertising

The Television Bureau of Advertising’s electronic sales platform ePort began transmitting orders to stations and is now supported by 644 stations in 186 markets — 97.8% of the U.S.

In January, the American Association of Advertising Agencies named Nancy Hill, a former executive at Lowe Worldwide and BBDO, as its next president-CEO.

On Feb. 5, just one day after News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin vowed he would maintain the upfront for his networks, Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger hinted that the annual showcase for advertisers may be on the outs.

Major advertiser and ad agency associations banded together in February to push ABC, CBS and NBC to reconsider $125 million per year in fees the networks charge them just for the privilege of buying time.

In February, with sweeps numbers almost in, and the upfront ad sales season about to rev up, first-run syndication again found itself in the position of proving its value as audiences erode for most of its shows.

At an April presentation, NBC executives described how they were seeking to make advertisers into long-term partners rather than just sell them 30-second commercials, with sponsors getting a say in content and their name on the show.

Starting with the May sweeps, Nielsen began reporting live-plus-three (L3) program ratings. Broadcasters are hopeful that they will finally get credit for viewership of recorded programming. But buyers are resisting, holding out for commercial ratings.

With a strong finishing kick from American Idol in May, Fox captured the distinction of being America’s most popular television network, winning a TV season for the first time since it began operation in 1987.

The Big 5 broadcast networks got $9.23 billion in this year’s upfront, 1.2% higher than last year’s total of 9.12 billion, and that total includes The CW network giving up $190 million in primetime revenue by outsourcing its Sunday night for next season.

Procter & Gamble Co. slashed media spending in the second quarter at a steep double-digit pace that accelerated as the quarter progressed. Not only that, but many of P&G’s biggest global rivals — including Unilever, L’Oréal and Johnson & Johnson — also cut U.S. spending.

NBC said it reached its stated goal of $1 billion in advertising sales for the Beijing Olympic Games, with the announcement coming one day prior to the Opening Ceremonies in August.

In what could be a major breakthrough for the burgeoning addressable TV advertising marketplace, a leading developer has created an open standard that will enable advertisers and agencies to easily and seamlessly integrate any method they use to target TV viewers, and then have those ads served to specific dayparts, programming genres, geographic zones, or even individual households.

Despite blaring headlines and economic concerns, little of the $9 billion in TV network upfront commitments has been abandoned by advertisers from agreements made in June.

CBS and Fox may be claiming victories so far for this new TV season, but in one key advertiser metric — C3, commercial ratings plus three days of DVR playback — ABC has taken an initial victory.

There’s plenty of bad news all around in the fourth quarter for spot sales: automotive (-24%), financial (-11%), movies (-13%) and packaged goods (-14%). Although heavy political buys will put the quarter well into the black, core national spending, more predicative of spending in upcoming quarters, may be off by 17%.

The Big 3 U.S. car manufacturers cut their advertising spending this year in another sign of the U.S. auto industry’s turmoil. Through July 2008, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler each spent 22% less on advertising than they did in 2007, while General Motors Corp. cut its ad spending by 6%.

About the only ad bright spot of 2008 was political ad money and even that didn’t live up to expectations. Overall spending will hit $2.16 billion with about $2.14 billion spent on traditional media, including TV, cable and radio-and $16.6 million spent online. And TNS Media Intelligence’s Campaign Media Analysis Group had predicted a skyrocketing $3 billion, which was trimmed later in the year to $2.5 billion.

NBC Universal began cutting ad staff in December amid a faltering economy and low ratings on its broadcast network. So far, approximately 30 staffers in the advertising sales department have been told they are losing their jobs and staffers involved in ad sales research also were let go.

As the year winds down, the networks brace for a tepid scatter market in 2009.

New Media

CBS announced in May that it was buying CNET Networks for $1.8 billion. CBS says the purchase will make it a top-10 U.S. Internet firm with approximately 200 million unique users monthly. The CNET sites will be combined with CBS’s national and local interactive businesses.

When Hulu bowed in March, naysayers questioned its ability to compete against YouTube or network sites without having original material of its own. But eight months after its launch, the joint venture of News Corp. and NBC Universal has become a popular online destination for viewers who want to catch up on their favorite shows at their leisure.

Beginning in July, TiVo began offering thousands of its subscribers the ability to stream YouTube videos onto their television sets through their broadband-enabled TiVo boxes.

The promise inherent in digital video recorders — that viewers can be in control of their own TV schedules — was rapidly being fulfilled this fall, and the business is changing around it. Nearly 30% of the nation’s TV homes have at least one.

Nielsen found that nearly a third of all household Internet activity in North America takes place while the user watches television, suggesting new and old media often share rather than compete for attention.

Fox Interactive Media liked the new Web platform that it developed for the Fox O&Os and affiliates so much that it decided to start a business marketing it to other broadcasters and to anybody else.

The Big 3 TV networks are trying to tap new revenue through online ads, attract new viewers and keep loyal fans.

Deaths

John Jay Iselin, who led WNET New York, the nation’s largest public television station, through a period of innovative programming, great popularity and wide influence, died May 6. He was 74.

Lionel Van Deerlin (D-Calif.), a former chairman of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee who bracketed his 18 years in Congress with stints as a newspaper and TV journalist, died May 17. He was 93.

Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys for his outrageously funny contributions to CBS’s The Carol Burnett Show and played a conniving politician to hilarious effect in Blazing Saddles, died May 29. He was 81.

Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In on NBC took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as “Sock it to me!” died May 25. He was 86.

Jim McKay, the sportscaster who spanned the globe to bring television viewers the constant variety of sports for more than 40 years on ABC’s influential Wide World of Sports, where he told of “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” died on June 7. He was 86.

Carl G. Eilers, an electrical engineer for 50 years with Zenith, who led the team that developed systems to broadcast stereo sound, first over FM, then over television, died June 20. He was 83.

George Carlin, the dean of counterculture comedians whose biting insights on life and language were immortalized in his ”Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV” routine, died of heart failure on June 22. He was 71.

Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died July 3. He was 83. Although not the original Bozo, Harmon portrayed the popular clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of television stations around the country.

John T. Reynolds, who was president of CBS in the mid-1960s and who also was president of Paramount Television and president of Golden West Broadcasters during his television career, died July 14. He was 87.

Ragan A. Henry, the first African American to own a network TV affiliate and who went on to build a portfolio of radio stations and other businesses, died July 26. He was 74.

Bernie Brillstein, the veteran Hollywood manager, producer and power broker died Aug. 7 evening of heart disease. The founder of Brillstein-Grey Entertainment helped bring Saturday Night Live and The Sopranos to television. He was 77.

Isaac Blonder, the co-founder of Blonder-Tongue Laboratories (with Ben Tongue) who developed cable amplifiers and one of the first pay TV encryption systems, died Aug. 29. He was 92. Blonder was also an early proponent over-the-air subscription TV.

Ike Pappas, the longtime CBS newsman who reported the shooting death of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald on the radio as it was happening, died Aug. 31. He was 75.

Pat Pollilo, whose television career spanned almost 40 years and who was vice president and general manager of KYW-TV Philadelphia from 1980 to 1984, died Sept. 2. He was 75.

Lou Dorfsman, who for more than 40 years designed every aspect of the Columbia Broadcasting System’s advertising and corporate identity, including Walter Cronkite’s news set, died Oct. 22. He was 90.

Studs Terkel, the master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose best-selling oral histories celebrated the common people he liked to call the “non-celebrated,” died Oct. 24. He was 96.

Earle Hagan, prolific composer of television themes and scores for I Spy, The Mod Squad, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gomer Pyle, and The Andy Griffith Show, for which he famously whistled the melody. Hagan died May 28th at the age of 88.

Michael Crichton, the million-selling author of such historic and prehistoric science thrillers as Jurassic Park, Timeline and The Andromeda Strain, and the creator and co-executive producer of NBC’s ER, died on Nov. 4. He was 66.

Robert Chandler, a former CBS News executive who helped launch 60 Minutes and supervised the TV newsmagazine in its early years, died Dec. 11. He was 80.