Before they started launching or buying their own cable channels in the 1990s, the Big 3 television networks were sanctimonious about an upstart medium called "cable TV." The late CBS chairman Laurence Tisch remarked to The New York Times in 1994 that "You can make more money on one hit program than you can on a whole damn cable network." The smugness was rooted in reality, at least for a while. Author Ken Auletta, who chronicled the rise and fall of the networks in the book "Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way," expressed the lay of the land in a 1991 interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb: "In 1976, which was arguably the best year network television ever had, 92 percent of all the people watching television in the evening were watching the three networks. There was no C-SPAN, there was no cable to speak of, no Disney Channel, no MTV, no ESPN, no CNN. There was no Fox Network. There were very few independent TV stations relatively speaking. No VCR. No cordless remote control equipment."
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