Narrator quotes from Network (1976)

Narrator

By mid-October, The Howard Beale Show had settled in at a 42% share, more than equaling all the other network news shows combined. In the Nielsen ratings, The Howard Beale Show was listed as the fourth highest rated show of the month, surpassed only by The Six Million Dollar Man, All in the Family and Phyllis - a phenomenal state of affairs for a news show - and on October the 15th, Diana Christensen flew to Los Angeles for what the trade calls "powwows and confabs" with our west coast programming execs and to get production rolling on the shows for the coming season.

Narrator

It was a perfectly admissible argument that Howard Beale advanced in the days that followed. It was, however, also a very depressing one. Nobody particularly cared to hear his life was utterly valueless. By the end of the first week in June, The Howard Beale Show had dropped one point in the ratings and its trend of shares dipped under 48% for the first time since last November.

Narrator

This was the story of Howard Beale: The first known instance of a man who was killed because of lousy ratings.