Two of television's best-known personalities and five broadcasting, cable and satellite-TV executives will join the honor roll in BROADCASTING & CABLE's Hall of Fame.
Talk-show legend Oprah Winfrey, Frasier
star Kelsey Grammer, Liberty Media's Peter Barton, Lifetime's Carole Black, DirecTV's Eddy W. Hartenstein, Advance/Newhouse Communications' Robert Miron, and Pax TV's Lowell (Bud) Paxson will be inducted during the 12th annual honors, to be celebrated Nov. 11 at a formal benefit dinner in New York's Marriott Marquis Hotel. Their induction will bring to more than 220 the number of individuals cited for career excellence since the Hall of Fame's inception on the magazine's 60th anniversary in 1991.
Oprah Winfrey's dominance of the talk-show genre has made her one of America's most powerful women. Her Chicago-based Harpo Inc. is now involved in publishing and cable as well as broadcast; she is a partner in the Oxygen channel, for which she will begin a prime time series this fall. Her independent TV productions include award-winning Tuesdays With Morrie.
Kelsey Grammer's Frasier
has been a mainstay of NBC-TV's prime time since 1993 and a subsequent force in syndication. He received two consecutive Emmy awards as outstanding actor. He began playing the character of Dr. Frasier Crane on another long-running success, Cheers,
in 1984 and was briefly on Wings
in 1992.
Cable pioneer Peter Barton
was the founding president and chief executive of Liberty Media Corp., which owns more than 120 programming networks. Among them: Cable Value Network (now QVC), Fox SportsNet, Court TV, Starz, Encore and The Learning Channel. Today, he is president of Barton and Associates, a private investment firm.
Carole Black's multimedia successes include marketing (at Procter & Gamble and in Disney's TV-marketing efforts), broadcasting (the first woman to head a major-market network O&O, NBC's KNBC[TV] Los Angeles) and now cable, where she has taken Lifetime Television to the No. 1 position.
The first in the satellite-TV industry to be named to the Hall of Fame, DirecTV Inc. Chairman and CEO Eddy W. Hartenstein
put the direct-satellite medium on the map for General Motors and Hughes Communications with the 1990 launch of what is now the industry's largest operation.
Robert Miron's entire career has been with the Newhouse organization, although he has worked both sides of the broadcast and cable street. He served as chairman of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association in 1989-90 and is now chairman of Advance/Newhouse, a company reasserting its presence on the MSO scene by reclaiming systems from Time Warner.
Bud Paxson's entrepreneurial achievements including the Home Shopping Network and family-oriented Pax TV. The Paxson TV Group also ranks No. 3 among the top 25 TV-group owners, with 68 stations and 33.7% coverage of U.S. TV homes.
Reservations for the BROADCASTING & CABLE Hall of Fame may be arranged through Steve Labunski at 212-889-6716.
