All-Stars Shine at Hall of Fame
By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld -- Multichannel News, 10/15/2006 8:00:00 PM
Denver — Denver— When all-stars stop in, everyone listens.
Example one: the would-be waste-removal specialist, Decker Anstrom.
“If Decker was a garbageman starting his route on Monday morning, he would go out on Sunday night and practice,” insisted Robert Miron, chairman and CEO of Advance/Newhouse Communications.
Miron was speaking of the former CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association in Washington, D.C.; former CEO of The Weather Channel; and now president and chief operating officer of Landmark Communications, which owns that network.
Anstrom was inducted Wednesday into the Cable Hall of Fame at the Cable Center here, for his work in leading the cable industry through tumultuous times in the 1990s, particularly in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Also honored in the ninth class of inductees were:
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Ralph M. Baruch, founder and former chairman of Viacom International. Baruch started at Viacom when the pronunciation was “Vee-ah-com.” He took charge of the company when it was spun off from CBS Inc. in 1971. There, he helped get the Showtime and Lifetime networks off the ground. And he’s just written a book about the experience of surviving both Adolph Hitler and the construction of the cable-centric entertainment goliath.
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Carolyn Chambers, chairman and CEO, Chambers Communications. The celebratory video commemorating her achievements duly noted how she went into a man’s world, earned her stripes and created the 19th-largest operator of cable systems. And all of the evening dinner’s participants could enjoy the Pinot Noir at their tables from her Panther Creek Cellars vineyard in Oregon. But, in the end, she was summed up by a female admirer in her video testimonial as “one tough broad.”
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Judy McGrath, the chairman and CEO of MTV Networks. Before the dinner began, she noted that her parent company, Viacom, now pronounced “VIE-ah-com,” has become the story of the year. That was an allusion to its ouster of former CEO Tom Freston and Viacom’s alleged failure to get sufficiently into the Internet programming game. But it’s still hard to argue with someone who showed how television could serve discrete audiences — and come up with 121 channels worldwide in the process.
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James Robbins, former CEO of Cox Communications. Allegedly challenged in the sartorial department, he first honored his brother Rob for having the brains in the family. But he showed a few himself in focusing his company on eradicating ill-will with subscribers and showing that a cable company can be renowned for customer service.
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Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast. Unabashedly proud of his father, Ralph, and unashamed that he took the opportunity of the fortune of his birth and capitalized on it. Cable pioneer John Malone lauded him for both his financial and basic business savvy, knowing how to transform the family’s Comcast cable business into the nation’s largest operator of high-capacity communications pipes and related services.
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Robert Zitter, executive vice president of technology operations at Home Box Office. Like McGrath, a person who spotted opportunity in the nascent cable television business a quarter-century ago and stuck with it. Zitter was responsible for the rollout of HBO’s nationwide scrambling of its satellite signal, protecting the value of the premium-priced product.
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