28 The Giants of Broadcasting and Electronic Arts is far more than an awards show. That is, indeed, the least — if most visible — of its missions. It is intended first as an historic acknowledgement of those individuals who have played themost significant roles in the creation of, the business of and the excellence behind themost significant collection of media since the invention of movable type. To be precise, broadcasting and its electronic successors, each with the ability to transmit sight and sound whether wirelessly or wired from one to many, unencumbered by time or largely free of the impediments of distribution. It began, of course, with radio, whose magic was unleashed for the world by a number of progenitors, of whom we have chosen Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi as the first Giant of all, he having successfully transmitted an electromagnetic signal across an ocean and between continents as the 20th century began (he was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize). He was preceded by, surrounded by and succeeded by a grand number of similarly imaginary talents, many of them contemporaneous today in what we think of as the new technology. His eminence, and theirs, may lead one to conclude that the engineers always come first in new electronic media, to be followed rapidly by the entrepreneurs who turn technology into viability and the entertainers and journalists who make the most of the microphones and cameras through which their own magic is communicated to the world. The Giants of Broadcasting and Electronic Arts, a creature of the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland, seeks to identify those professionals whose careers have demonstrated outstanding excellence in four disciplines: the innovators who create new technologies, the entrepreneurs who build business infrastructures to exploit them, the programmers (entertainers and actors as well as those behind the footlights) whose talent and creativity attract the greatest audience, and the journalists who collectively have created the increasingly important if not dominant news and information media whose effect has been no less than to transform mankind. It has been the purpose of the Giants event and its associated endeavors to recognize this professionalismand excellence atop amultimedia universe that comprises radio, conventional television, cable TV, satellite, the Internet and now social media, to list those most prominent at this moment in Giant development. While all may differ in intent and competitiveness, they are one under the Giants umbrella for one salient reason: they all impact the worldwide audience simultaneously through either a radio speaker or a television screen. The Giants of Broadcasting and Electronic Arts — now in its 12th anniversary year — operates in a number of forums. Perhaps most visibly through its annual luncheon and awards ceremony in New York City, generally in the fall (this year on October 16 at Gotham Hall, an historic landmark at Broadway and 36th Street); secondarily through a website that over time will present the biographies of all 170 Giants honored in the first 11 years of the honors program and those who will emerge hereafter. And perhaps most importantly at the Library of American Broadcasting itself, where biographical and oral histories, books written by and about the Giants and papers in their individual collections are being accumulated. My personal and professional experience with the Giants began as an outgrowth of a journalistic career devoted almost entirely to the study and reporting of what had begun to be called the Fifth Estate, which was indeed the proposed name for Broadcasting magazine, founded in Washington in 1931 by Sol Taishoff and Martin Codel, two former reporters of David Lawrence’s U.S. Daily (later to become theU.S. News and World Report) who recognized in the then new medium of radio a dynamic departure fromwhat had been labeled the Fourth Estate, to describe the printed press. Broadcasting through the rest of that century was known as the “bible” of the industry, and played a pivotal role in the business and politics of the new mediumand its successors in television and cable. My own involvement with the industry began in my youth, and my professional experience with the industry and its leaders was sealed when I joined the magazine in 1953. I succeeded Taishoff as editor upon his death in 1982 and it became Broadcasting & Cable in 1993. Broadcasting’s principal editorial dedication was to the First Amendment and to what it considered the second-class citizenship of the broadcast media, as a result of governmental regulation. Both that policy and a seriousness about radio’s and television’s roles in the national fabric came with me when I joined the board of directors of the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation and later became its president. The library itself — owned and supported by the foundation under the curatorship of the University of Maryland — I considered a professional and academic extension of the electronic media that had grown from Marconi’s experimentation a century before, and the Giants of Broadcasting was established in 2003 to help bring a professional focus on the history and traditions of an industry still imbued by the difference it has wrought in the world of communication, and told through the lives and careers of those who have had the greatest impact upon it. In 2011, following the tide of history, the title was enlarged to embrace all electronic arts. In its first years, the Giants event concentrated on the industry’s first generation, a work that continues but has moved on to honor a second generation as well. It is now entering a third generation, characterized not so much by the founders of radio and television, but by those who are changing the game as new technologies and possibilities proliferate. Will the profession ever run out of Giants? Our experience has shown otherwise. Indeed, the challenge of the Library of American Broadcasting — and of the Giants celebration — remains to keep up with the times. So far, they’re still ahead. *Don West is the chairman of The Giants of Broadcasting and Electronic Arts. By Don West * Lifeat theU.S. Summitof TelevisionandRadio October 2014 The Giants Awards RCA and NBC founder David Sarnoff CBS founder William S. Paley ABC founder Leonard Goldenson
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