Ralph Baruch

Rudolph Maximilian "Ralph" Baruch (August 5, 1923 – March 3, 2016) was a German-American CBS executive and the first president and chief executive of Viacom.

Early life Baruch was born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923, but his family fled in the mid-1930s to Paris. His father returned to Germany, however, in 1938 to recruit spies for French counterintelligence services, and his name ended up on the Nazi most-wanted list. The Emergency Rescue Committee helped the family immigrate to New York City in 1940.

Business career 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.

Under the Viacom brand, Baruch started cable networks including Showtime and Lifetime (originally known as The Cable Health Network). He 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.

Baruch played a leading role in getting Congress to pass the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984, which deregulated the cable industry.