Corporate censorship in early US television advertising

For the most part [...] the old radio system ruled TV through the mid-fifties, which also meant a continuation of program practices so successful in radio: programming was aimed toward the lowest common denominator; sponsors combed through scripts to delete what they considered to be offending words or characterizations; controversy, either in deal­ing with serious social issues or simply in using black actors, was frowned upon. The latter policy was conducted particularly with an eye toward appeasing Southern stations.

Sponsors paid particular attention to anything they thought would boost the competition.

This often went to ridiculous extremes. Westinghouse at first refused to allow 'Studio One' to broadcast an adaptation of Kipling's 'The Light That Failed,' believing that the show would reflect badly on their bulbs. As Worthington Miner pointed out in his memoirs, West­inghouse became so wound up over the light-bulb issue that it completely overlooked its sponsorship of a homosexual love story!

Chevrolet wouldn't allow a pioneer on one of its shows to 'ford' a river, and Ford wouldn't allow a shot of the New York skyline on a program it sponsored because the Chrys­ler building was shown. Chrysler wouldn't allow Abraham Lincoln's name to be mentioned on a CBS show about the Civil War, while Mars Candy Company objected to a script in which a little girl was given a dollar to buy ice cream and cookies.

On the 'Camel News Caravan,' in an interview with 'Lucky' Luciano, only the mob­ster's first name, Charles, could be used, so viewers would not confuse it with an ad for Lucky Strikes. The word 'lucky' seemed to pose a particular problem for American Tobacco's competitors. Scriptwriters regularly combed through thesaurus to dredge up synonyms like 'fortunate' or 'providential' whenever the forbidden 'L word' popped up. How bad could it get? This bad: even the word 'American' was proscribed on one show.

- Jeff Kisseloff, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, 2013, quoted in DelanceyPlace.com