The answer to this necessity lay in access to AT&T’s long distance network, and this would become the secret weapon of the broadcast networks. A show produced in New York would be carried around the country over AT&T’s long lines or microwave towers: from the 1920s through the 1960s there was still no other way of constituting a network. And so, to a degree many have forgotten, the broadcast triopoly and the telephone monopoly were intimately linked.
