William H. Tankersley, Watchdog for CBS Taste Standards

William H. Tankersley, who defined broadcast standards for CBS during a volatile period of change in mores on television and in American society, doing celebrated battle with envelope pushers like Norman Lear and the Smothers Brothers, died on Feb. 5 in Scottsdale (AZ). He was 98.

From the mid-1950s until 1972, when he left CBS to become head of the national Council of Better Business Bureaus, Tankersley served as the firewall between the viewers of the network’s programs and those writers, producers and advertisers who might willfully or inadvertently offend their sensibilities. He was, in effect, the network’s chief censor, though he would not have labeled his role that way. His job was not to protect the public, he said, so much as it was to guard the business and reputation of the company he worked for: “Mainly it was to make whatever came out of that tube on a CBS station be something you could be proud of,” he said. Under the Code of Practices, a set of ethical standards established in the early 1950s and voluntarily agreed to by broadcasters, things like profanity, sexual references, disparagement of religion and the depiction of drug use and drunkenness were closely monitored on all three networks. However, the standards at CBS, which was known, both admiringly and mockingly, as the Tiffany network, were considered stricter than the norm.