[2][3] Following his graduation, he spent the three months of the summer of 1931 doing publicity for the Buck Hill Falls, where he started a weekly newspaper called "The Breeze".
[5] About a year later, fellow Swarthmore alumnus C. Norman Stabler helped Kintner obtain a job as a financial reporter for the New York Herald Tribune.
[5] This was fortuitous timing for Kintner, as former New York chief assistant district attorney Ferdinand Pecora was appointed chief counsel to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking and Currency in January 1933 to head up what became known as the Pecora Commission, given wide remit to investigate all the many financial abuses and crimes that had caused the Great Depression.
[8] During World War II, Kintner served in the U.S. Army Air Force, leaving the service in 1944 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
The network played a crucial role in broadcasting the Army-McCarthy hearings and showcased popular shows such as Disneyland, which featured a blockbuster hit with Davy Crockett.
Another success was Cheyenne, the pioneering hour-long television Western that sparked a trend in Western-themed entertainment dominating the medium's lineup through 1963.
Kintner was forced to defend NBC at the height of the late 1950s quiz show scandals, testifying to the United States Congress that NBC and the other networks were victims of the quiz-show rigging just as viewers were, and that the networks were working to wrest production control of programming from advertisers, whose pressure had been seen as a key influence driving the scandals.