Rudolph Maximilian "Ralph" Baruch was a German-American CBS executive and the first president and chief executive of Viacom.
12 Facts About Ralph Baruch
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Ralph Baruch's father returned to Germany in 1938 to recruit spies for French counterintelligence services, and his name ended up on the Nazi most-wanted list.
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Ralph Baruch was hired in 1943 as an engineer at Empire Broadcasting, and later as an ad salesman at New York's DuMont Network affiliate and with the Los Angeles Times's Consolidated Television Film Sales in the eastern United States.
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In 1954, Ralph Baruch became an account executive for CBS Television Film Sales.
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Ralph Baruch later became vice president of CBS and general manager of CBS Enterprises, the company's cable and television syndication division.
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Under the Viacom brand, Ralph Baruch started cable networks including Showtime and Lifetime.
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Ralph Baruch took the title of chairman of Viacom in 1983, and later acquired Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment, which brought networks including MTV, Nickelodeon, The Movie Channel and VH1 into the portfolio.
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Ralph Baruch played a leading role in getting Congress to pass the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984, which deregulated the cable industry.
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In 2006, Ralph Baruch was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame.
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Ralph Baruch was a co-founder, past chairman and chairman emeritus of the National Academy of Cable Programming, as well as past president of the International Radio and Television Society.
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Ralph Baruch served as vice chairman of Carnegie Hall from 1997 to 1999, and as a member of its executive committee.
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In 2007, Ralph Baruch wrote a memoir entitled Television Tightrope: How I Escaped Hitler, Survived CBS and Fathered Viacom.