When the NBC television network launched the Texaco Star Theater, a vaudeville-style revue, in 1948, comedian Milton Berle became an American icon. Within months he was on the competing covers of Time and Newsweek. Some joked that Berle was so popular in those early days of television that he prompted more people to buy TV sets than all of RCA's advertising. Sometimes he was corny, sometimes outrageous, as in skits in which he played parts in drag. Clearly he was right for the times, and the growing network television audience called him Uncle Miltie. He was a Tuesday night fixture in the lives of many Americans.

After Berle led the network ratings three straight years, NBC signed him to an exclusive, lifetime contract at six figures a year -- an unprecedented deal. A few years later, however, with more competition and audience fickleness showing itself, the ratings slipped. Both Berle and NBC were pleased to negotiate a lower stipend that allowed him to also work for other networks.

Berle's mother, Sandra Berlinger, was a stage mom. When he was barely out of diapers, she landed him a modeling job for Buster Brown shoes and then got him vaudeville, theater and night club gigs. When he was 6, his mother moved the family to Hollywood and Berle appeared in more than 50 silent movies. His first television appearance was an experimental 1929 broadcast.

Berle, who was born 1908, was the first inductee to the Television Hall of Fame in 1984. In 1996 he became the first recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the New York Television Academy.

Peggy Charren

After watching television with her two young daughters, Peggy Charren decided something needed doing. "Children television time was filled with cartoon adventures, often violent and rarely creative, in story or animation form," she said. "Youngsters were being told to want unhealthy food and expensive toys." Charren invited neighborhood moms to her livingroom to discuss the "wall-to-wall monster cartoons." Thus, in 1968, was born Action for Children's Television. which, with Charren in charge, became the most influential non-government entity shaping American television for the next two decades.

The first target was Romper Room, a Boston-produced show that was little more than a program-length commercial aimed at kids. The host shamelessly hawked Romper Room's own line of toys from sign-on to sign-off. ACT sponsored a university study of Romper Room and was ready to take the findings to the Federal Communications Commission when station WHDH, which produced the show, stopped the "host-selling" to get Charren off its back -- ACT's first victory.

Action for Children's Television then requested meetings with the three big networks, but ABC and NBC said no. Insulted, Charren and her growing organization decided to take their cause to the government. In 1970, ACT became the first public interest group to request a meeting with the FCC. The commission responded by creating a permanent group to oversee children's television issues. With the new government pressure, the National Association of Broadcasters, the major industry trade group, established new standards for children's television. The new guidelines barred "host-selling" and put a 12-minute per hour cap on commercials during children's television. The lesson for ACT was that government pressure works. "We found that when the regulators make noise the industry takes action to keep the rules away," Charren said.

In 1971 ACT went to the Federal Trade Commission to complain about advertising. "One-third of the commercials were for vitamin pills, even though the bottles said, 'Keep out of reach of children' because an overdose could put them in a coma," said Charren. Before the FTC could act, the vitamin-makers withdrew the ads. Four years later, when Spiderman vitamins ads found their way onto kids shows, the Federal Trade Commission, primed by ACT, got rid of them.

There were other battles, but the major victory for Charren and Action for Children's Television was the Children's Television Act of 1990. The law established government expectations for children's programming across a wide range of issues, including advertising, content and quantity. In 1992, to the surprise of many people, Charren announced she was disbanding ACT. After 24 years, she said, ACT has met the objectives that she had set out to accomplish, With the Children's Television Act in effect, the need for ACT had passed. At that point, ACT had 10,000 members.

Through all her crusading for better children's programming, Charren never called for censorship. Her battle cry was choice. "Censorship meant fewer choices. We needed more choice, not less." She did, however, admit to pushing "to eliminate commercial abuses targeted to children." Even with violent programs, about which she had grave reservations, Charren never called for censorship. Her view:

"Violent television teaches children that violence is the solution to problems, that violent behavior can be fun and funny, that criminals and police make up a larger percentage of the population than they really do, and that violent behavior is practiced by heroes as well as by villains. But you can't say that there shouldn't be any violence on television. It is the context that is really important. Too often, children are the excuse for banning speech: words and pictures in comic books, movies, classic stories, textbooks and television. But government censorship is not the way to protect children from inappropriate content."

Christine Craft

Kansas City television anchor Christine Craft was stunned. Her boss, the news director, had sat her down in his office and announced he was taking her off the anchor desk. He flashed a consultant's report at her. "We've just gotten our research back," he said. "You are too old, too unattractive, and not sufficiently deferential to men." He went on: "When the people of Kansas City see your face, they turn the dial."

Chrstine Craft was incredulous. During her few months at KMBC, in 1981, the station had climbed to Number One for the first time in three years. She was an experienced television journalist who had anchored in her hometown, at KEYT in Santa Barbara; reported in San Francisco, at KPIX; and anchored a sports show on the CBS network. At 36, she was hardly over the hill. What did her news director mean that she was "not sufficiently deferential to men"? He explained that she had not played second fiddle to male co-anchors. "You don't hide your intelligence to make the guys look smarter. People don't like that you know the difference between the American and the National league."

Angry, Chris Craft sued. She charged that KMBC was demoting her on sexist grounds, claiming that male anchors were not held to the same standards in age, appearance or deference, Further, she said, the station had paid her unfairly $38,500 compared to $75,000 for her male co-anchor. It was an important moment in American television, triggering an overdue sensitivity to equal opportunity and treatment for women and men.

Craft won her jury trial and even an appeal trial before a second jury. In further appeals, however, the Metromedia conglomerate, which owned KMBC, prevailed. But Craft had made her point on behalf of women broadcasters throughout the land.

Within two years, Craft was back as an anchor and happy at KRBK in Sacramento. Then she was named news director and managing editor, the first woman to hold the positions at a Sacramento television station.

Walter Cronkite

In the 1960s and 1970s, with Americans increasingly disillusioned with their national leadership, a journalist, Walter Cronkite, was picking up credibility. By the 1980s polls found Cronkite, the managing editor and anchor for the CBS Evening News, was the most trusted person in the nation. A kindly, avuncular quality complemented his obvious commitment to truth-seeking and truth-telling. He was there, on screen, for every major national event as long as many people could remember: space shots, assassinations, national political conventions, war. While he was centrist in his news judgment, he sometimes took positions. In 1968, after a visit to Vietnam, he questioned whether the war could be won and called for the United States to withdraw.

Cronkite covered World War II in Europe for United Press. Afterward he rebuilt UP's operation in the Benelux countries and then went to Moscow as bureau chief. Along the way, he covered the Nuremberg war trials. In 1950 he went with CBS to build the news department at television station WTOP in Washington. Over the next few years he anchored documentaries, public affairs programs and the network morning news. In 1962, the evening network newscast was revamped with Cronkite in charge. The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite became the first half-hour network newscast in 1963.

Cronkite was unabashedly supportive of the U.S. space program, and his newscasts reflected it. He made himself an expert on technical matters, and he himself anchored the coverage for most major space shots. For the first moon landing, of Apollo 11 in 1969, he was on-air 24 hours straight.

One of Cronkite's disappointments was the failure of his proposal for one-hour network news programs in the evening. CBS affiliates shot down the idea because it would mean fewer slots for lucrative local ads.

Cronkite retired in 1981 but continued on special projects for CBS and other organizations. As the Grand Old Man of broadcast journalism, he was in demand as a speaker and not infrequently called upon to testify on broadcast and journalistic issues before Congress.

Barry Diller

Skeptics were everywhere when Fox television went on the air. A lot of people had dreamed of launching a fourth over-air U.S. television network against the ABC-CBS-NBC oligopoly, but nobody had ever succeeded. In 1987 global media mogul Rupert Murdoch took the plunge, launching Fox. It was a ragtag network of second-tier stations with only a few programs a week, but there was excitement abort it. Part of the excitement was a David and Goliath tilting at the Big Three networks.

In charge was Barry Diller. As president of Fox, he charted a shrewd course: Build a base with Sunday night programming, then Saturday night, then weeknights. His strategy was to keep costs low with programs that would attract audiences but not cost much to produce. A lot of programs had fast-paced cops and robbers themes with lots of on-scene and amateur footage He avoided a costly news operation.

Fox grew. In fact, under Diller's strategy, the network had profitable periods when the Big Three were losing tremendous amounts of money. Proud of his success and feeling he deserved greater reward, Diller went to his boss, the network's owner, Rupert Murdoch, and proposed that he be allowed to buy into the ownership of the network. Murdoch said no. Diller quit.

That began a sabbatical for Diller. He spent months exploring opportunities for applying his skills and creativity. In 1992 Diller announced he had put $25 million into the QVC home-shopping network, and he began upgrades and innovations there. He remained restless, however. He was among the suitors who tried to acquire CBS in the mid-1990s, and he was continually looking for opportunities to integrate his television enterprises with interactive media, including the World Wide Web.

Philo Farnsworth

Philo Farnsworth was 11 when his family loaded three covered wagons to move to a farm near Rigby in eastern Idaho. Cresting a ridge, young Farnsworth, at the reins of one wagon, surveyed the homestead below and saw wires linking the buildings. "This place has electricity!" he exclaimed. Philo obsessed on the electricity, and soon he was an expert at fixing anything electrical that went wrong.

That day when the Farnsworths settled near Rigby, in 1919, was the first of three pivotal moments in young Farnsworth's life that led to technology on which television is based.

The next pivotal moment came two years later when Farnsworth was 13. He found an article about scientists who were working on ways to add pictures to radio but they couldn't figure out how. He then went out to hitch the horses to a harvesting machine to bring in the potatoes. As he guided the horses back and forth across the field, up one row, down the next, he visualized how moving pictures could be captured live and transmitted to a faraway place. If the light that enables people to see could be converted to electrons and then transmitted one at a time but very fast as a beam, back and forth on a surface, then, perhaps, television could work.

The ideas simmered a few months and then, when he was 14, Farnsworth chalked a complicated diagram for "electronic television" on his chemistry teacher's blackboard. The teacher, Justin Tolman, was impressed. In fact, 15 years later Tolman would reconstruct those blackboard schematics so convincingly that Farnsworth would win a patent war with RCA and cloud RCA's claim that its Vladimir Zworykin invented television.

Farnsworth's native intelligence, earnest and charm helped win over the people around him. When he was 19, working in Salt Lake City, Farnsworth found a man with connections to San Francisco investors. With their backing, the third pivotal moment in Farnsworth's work, he set up a lab in Los Angeles, later in San Francisco, and put his drawings and theories to work. In 1927, with hand-blown tubes and hand-soldered connections, Farnsworth had a contraption he called the Image Dissector. It picked up the image of a glass slide and transmitted it to the next room. Biographer Paul Schatzkin described the moment this way:

"All present could see the straight-line image shimmering boldly in an eerie electronic hue on the bottom of Farnsworth's magic tubes." When his brother-in-law rotated the slide, "everybody could see the image on the receiver rotate as well, clearly proving that they were witnessing visual intelligence being transmitted from one place to another."

Brian Lamb

Brian Lamb, an unpretentious, contemplative man, had been in news in Washington for 22 years when he got the idea for C-SPAN. He had seen government as a UPI radio reporter. He had plied public relations on the Hill and at the White House. In the 1970s, as satellite-relayed television came into being and as cable was growing, Brian Lamb saw what no one else did -- possibilities for television that dealt exclusively with public affairs.

In Lamb's mind, this would be a television network using relatively cheap satellite time to cover sessions of Congress live and beam them down to local cable systems. The network wouldn't try expensive production. It would just have somebody with a camera at places where news was occurring and turn it on. Why would anybody want to carry such "talking head" programs? Lamb told cable industry leaders it would give them prestige with public-minded viewers. The cable people saw it as a low-cost way to blunt elitists' criticism that they weren't offering anything much worth watching. They agreed to offer the new network free to every subscriber and give Lamb a few pennies a month for each of those subscribers.

In 1978, C-SPAN, short for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, began a 24-hour service that showed the U.S. House of Representatives when it was session and filled the rest of the time with interviews and discussions on public affairs. Only a couple blocks from the Capitol, C-SPAN has become regular stopping point for major players on the issues of the day. Viewers could call in and exchange their thoughts with the nation's movers and shakers. C-SPAN calls itself "America's town hall."

Lamb sees C-SPAN's greatest strength is letting the cameras roll nonstop and live, giving viewers an unvarnished, unpolished look at what's happening. He told an Insight magazine interviewer in 1996:

"If you have the camera running long enough, you're going to catch real life. So much of television is in a hurry. It's a package. My notion is always to make it real life. I have never understood that if we like our daily living habits, why we like the medium of television, which takes a normal situation, edits it, puts music to it, speeds it up, or slows it down. People watching television become frustrated because their lives aren't as exciting as what they see on television. But real life isn't like that."

The C-SPAN audience is not huge. Perhaps 10 million people turn in at least once a month. But the audience is an important one -- educated, bright, concerned.

Jerry Levin

When Andrew Heiskell ran Time Inc., he liked to refer to Jerry Levin as his "resident genius." It was Levin who had taken Home Box Office, a pay-television service in Time's corporate backwaters, and persuaded Heiskell to rent a transponder on the Satcom I orbiting satellite. From Satcom, as Levin laid out his vision, the HBO signal could be amplified and re-transmitted down to local cable systems.

Technologically, Levin's proposal was ambitious. Financially it was risky.

At the time, in 1975, cable offered no distinctive programming. Local systems merely picked up signals from relatively nearby over-air television stations and sent them by cable to people who couldn't get clear over-air reception with rooftop antennas. There had been little thought since cable's beginnings a quarter century earlier to do anything more. Cable was a comfortable, if not sleepy, small-town business. The early innovators who built the nation's hometown cable systems were either departed or sitting back collecting monthly fees from their subscribers.

Back then the nation's cities were not wired. City people didn't need cable. They got clear reception with rabbit-ears that sat on top of their TV sets. Only outlying communities, at the fringes of the reach of over-air signals from the nearest city, needed cable.

Would Levin's proposal work?

• Would the nation's small-town cable operators invest in the 12-foot dish and other equipment necessary to pick up HBO signal from Satcom I?
• How many cable customers would pay extra for HBO programming, mostly movies that had already played the movie-house circuit months earlier?
• Would cable operators realize enough revenue to offset their capital outlay for reception equipment, and to pay Time for HBO, and to make some profit?
• Would Time have enough income to meet HBO expenses, including the substantial fee for Satcom time?

As the future began unfolding with HBO's success, Jerry Levin became a Time Inc. corporate strategist. In 1989, he put together the merger with Warner Communications, the biggest media deal to that date. In 1993, he was elected chairman and chief executive officer. And in 1995, just after Disney acquired ABC to displace Time-Warner as the world's largest media company, Levin proposed to Ted Turner that his company become part of Time-Warner. The deal placed Time-Warner neck and neck with Disney-ABC as the largest media company.

Edward R. Murrow

Not long out of college, Edward R. Murrow had a job arranging student exchanges for the Institute of International Education, including some exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union. That was in 1932, and it seemed a good job-lots of travel, interesting people, doing something worthwhile. In the early 1950s, though, the demagogic Red Scare-meisters tried to discredit Murrow as somehow tied to the communist ideology on which the Soviet Union was founded. By that time, Murrow had established his reputation as a broadcast journalist and was a CBS executive.

Although personally offended at being branded a communist sympathizer. Murrow was even more outraged by the anti-communist hysteria that some members of Congress, notably Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, were stirring. Many of his network colleagues had been blacklisted. A close friend committed suicide after being falsely accused.

In 1954 on his weekly CBS television program, See It Now, Murrow went after McCarthy, combining his narrative with film clips that exposed the senator's hypocrisy. Many analysts say that was a pivotal moment in McCarthy's dubious career. His innuendoes and lies, which had caused such great damage, were exposed. Some say the program, bringing down one of most recognized members of the Senate, was a clear demonstration of television's powerful potential in public affairs.

Murrow began with CBS covering Hitler's arrival in Vienna in 1938. He devised the format for the CBS World News Roundup, rotating from correspondent to correspondent around Europe for live reports. During World War II he became known for his gripping reports from London. Standing on rooftops with sirens, antiaircraft guns and exploding German bombs in the background, he would describe what was happening. There was poignancy, color and detail in his reporting. Consider this description of an Allied air drop over Holland:

There they go. Do you hear them shout? I can see their chutes going down now. Everyone clear. They're dropping just beside a little windmill near a church, hanging there very gracefully. They seem to be completely relaxed like nothing so much as khaki dolls hanging beneath a green lamp shade.

One of Murrow's television signature was an ever-present cigarette. His habit, however, didn't get in his way of examining the dangers of smoking on See It Now."He died of lung cancer at age 57.

Nic Robertson

When terrorists attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, only one Western journalist was in Taliban-controlled southern Afghanistan. Nic Robertson's reports for CNN were exclusives. He reported from Kandahar that Afghans, well-tuned to anticipating war, were preparing for a massive U.S. reaction to the September 11 attacks in the United States. Suddenly, Robertson reported from Kandahar, the women and children were gone. Only men remained. A few days later the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan began, aimed at the prime suspect in the New York and Washington attacks, Osama bin Laden, who was holed up in Afghanistan.

After eight days of reports from Afghanistan, Robertson, a British subject, was expelled with other foreigners by the Taliban government. He protested, arguing that the Taliban's side wouldn't get told if he, as a journalist, wasn't allowed to stay and report. The government responded that his safety couldn't be guaranteed. Street mobs could be a problem, the government said. Robertson repaired across the Pakistan border and continued his reporting on Afghanistan from afar. Within a month, however, Robertson was back inside the country with live videophone reports.

The U.S. and British attacks that materialized a few days later were hardly Robertson's first experience as a war correspondent. Ten years earlier during the Persian Gulf war, Robertson was a CNN engineer with three CNN reporters, including Pulitzer Prize-winning Peter Arnett, who reported on the U.S. attack on Baghdad from a high-rise hotel even as Iraqi authorities were hunting for them to expel them from the country. It was Robertson who had smuggled the satellite transmission equipment into Iraq that made the live Baghdad video coverage possible. To get the equipment into Iraq, he had broken it down into components that Iraqi authorities didn't recognize for what they were.

Later Robertson was a field producer who accompanied CNN chief war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, to wars and tensions in Bosnia, Ireland, Kosovo and Pakistan.

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