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Abstract

Although television manufacturing in the United States stalled during World War II, the television industry did not simply disappear from 1941 to 1945. Its interrelated components continued to plan, debate, and formulate. That planning drove demand for a trade association to steer and represent industry participants, from the most powerful players to the basic units of broadcasting. The result was the Television Broadcasters Association (TBA). Using archival documents from the Library of Congress’s National Broadcasting Company history files and the Wisconsin Historical Society’s National Association of Broadcasters Records, this article centers the trade association within the development and launch of mainstream commercial television, countering the tendency of media scholars to sideline trade associations or to treat the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) as the inevitable home of the US television industry. Put very simply, the TBA wanted television, and the NAB did not—at least in the 1940s. As an association organized to facilitate the success of radio, the NAB boasted a mature infrastructure and a sizeable AM membership. The TBA was an upstart, a small group of industry elites aspiring to treat television as inherently special and superior to radio. The story of dueling trade associations highlights the social and institutional entanglements within the web of industry relations and emphasizes the power of local broadcasters. The NAB had integrated the personnel and agendas of radio stations into its structure and governance. And though stations’ participation could be volatile, the TBA eventually discovered that their absence would ensure failure.

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