On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television CABLE TROUBLE BY MARVIN KITMAN Last month the prestigious Sloan Commission on Cable Communications finally released its report on the future of broadcasting. After spending 18...
...After spending 18 months and $500,000 of the late Alfred Sloan Jr.'s money, the commission????made up of 16 distinguished economists, attorneys, educators, scientists, and public figures, but no well-known TV viewers????concluded that cable television was the most promising thing to come along since commercial television...
...There never was a time when I had the slightest intention of bribing Mayor [Kenneth] Tompkins and the other Johnstown officials," Kahn explained before the U.S...
...Still, a very close legal question is being raised...
...Nobody comprehends cable TV completely, and I'm no exception...
...The commission has a lot of faith in a group of communicators who, in the first 20 years or so of cable, have not done a noticeably impressive job of enriching the programming available to their subscribers...
...Anybody today can produce a show for cable at a hundredth of what it costs the networks, but writing a mediocre script, finding unemployed actors, picking out records for background music????these esoteric arts frighten the cable operators...
...He'll turn it into the greatest business in the world...
...While commercial broadcasters have always been against this practice of getting something for nothing as being basically immoral, the cable people have been saying for years that without it the industry can go nowhere...
...The Scandals of the '80s will be followed by the Reforms of the '90s, when the grandsons of the cable millionaires begin feeling guilty about the sins of the grandfathers...
...This means a cable operator in New York can pick up a signal from a station in Philadelphia or Baltimore and bring the program to his subscribers in New York...
...Kahn is the statesman of the industry...
...As a member of The Committee for a Free Irving Kahn and Against Pay TV, I am not without bias in this case...
...One man's bribery is another man's extortion...
...But I gather one of the great hopes for the future is a technique called "distant importation of signals...
...This can provide diversity in programming...
...Having to say that about Kahn's stature in the cable business is perhaps what is wrong with the cable business...
...Yet what would prevent the Pay TV moguls from using 15 channels for movies like The Love Machine and five for pornography...
...It might open, say, 20 channels for movies the networks won't run...
...Is the pitcher having a good day or the batter a bad one...
...The cable operators' own public relations men would have charged twice as much for it...
...Don't worry about Irving," explained one of his admirers, who declined to join the committee...
...Kahn is claiming it was extortion, not bribery," one of the committee's legal experts explained...
...This should make the artists responsible for the programs as happy as authors would be if the Sloan Commission told the Taiwan book pirates they had to pay for their scrutable thefts...
...That's not quite true," protested a rival foundation executive...
...It is this extraordinary patience with broadcasters which is the true public service...
...And a few luckier cable areas get local high school basketball games...
...How many years should network presidents get for all the commercials on Saturday mornings...
...For example, his cable system in Manhattan gives subscribers not only all the regular commercial TV programs, but the Ranger and Knick games too...
...In general the study was received with delight and some astonishment by members of the cable TV industry...
...Irving Kahn, the former president of TelePrompter, is the kind of loud-mouthed venture capitalist who in the 19th century might have gone into gold mines...
...Commercial broadcasting is described in the report as the television of scarcity, and cable as the television of abundance...
...Hopefully the royalty settled upon will be so high as to induce the cable franchise owners to produce their own programs, which other franchise owners might want to borrow...
...The report's advocacy of laissez-faire in ownership should also encourage the consolidation of franchises in the hands of the few, like good-TV lover Howard Hughes...
...Look at the way he got TelePrompter stock up to 40 times its earnings, and it's all puff...
...The sole reason I paid them any money was to protect my company from having its business destroyed...
...Unless he paid the money, his corporation would be hurt...
...In New York City, among the cable angels is the Hughes Tool Company...
...District Court in Manhattan in a statement that should live in the annals of broadcasting morality...
...Those ruthless guys are not going to last forever...
...Not that there is anything wrong with 19 channels of X-rated movies, as long as one channel is open for an occasional Walt Disney on Parade...
...They couldn't have done better if they had written it themselves...
...Several communities now have locally produced bingo-game shows...
...The committee agrees with Kahn's contention that it was extortion, not bribery...
...Or any TV...
...The man is a genius...
...The Sloan Commission resolves what has been called "the gut economic issue" preventing cable TV from fulfilling its great promise by suggesting that the operators pay a royalty for every program they pluck out of the air...
...Little guys can't do it...
...Coincidentally, a week or so before the Sloan Commission report was published, one of the cable TV industry's leading spokesmen, after years of public service, was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine...
...They prefer to buy fifth-run crap with integrated commercials...
...A basic law of press relations is never tell a newspaperman something he won't understand...
...All of a sudden everybody will be wanting to own license plates for every room in the house, or something...
...I strongly feel I'm not guilty of bribery...
...He wasn't dangling money in front of the city officials...
...A cable TV franchise is evidently such a wonderful thing to own that even some commercial broadcasters own them...
...The commissioners predict that turning cable loose from all restraints, including regulation by the FCC (which hasn't been able to regulate commercial broadcasting for 30 years) and opening the door to pay TV will encourage a diversity of entertainment, public affairs, news, and opinion programs, as well as a multitude of services...
...The Sloan Commission report, however, suggests that viewers who want a message in their programming will be able to turn to cable instead of Western Union...
...Pay TV won't automatically, or even logically, bring about good programming...
...The Follies of the '70s, as outlined in the Sloan Commission report, will be followed by the Scandals of the '80s...
...If he ever goes to jail, he will be very good for the prison system...
...It's understandable that the cable TV industry is a little embarrassed by such high praise for its potential...
...It's like the pitcher striking out a batter...
...Come to think of it, that's not so bad compared to some network programs...
...He admitted making payments of $15,000 to three Johnstown officials...
...Everything in the Sloan Commission report is technically possible, and I would feel better about its probability if the cable operators were men with especially strong feelings of social responsibility...
...In most communities, unfortunately, the franchises have already been given away to the equivalent of the men who once repaired our TV sets, often supported financially by those other do-gooders in American arts, the banks...
...Where it will go with the freedom to import the collected works of out-of-town stations I am not quite certain...
...And he might not be as outstanding a citizen as William Paley of CBS...
...But assuming Kahn is guilty of corrupting three adults, how does that crime compare to the number of children corrupted by the commercial broadcasters...
...Maybe Kahn wasn't as good a statesman as the late David Sarnoff, who gave the American people the commercial TV network...
...This may be the reason the stories I've read in the papers about the Sloan Commission study aren't very clear about how cable will actually bring us to the promised land...
...I yielded to the pressure of these corrupt officials to keep them from harming Tele-Prompter, not to gain favors for the company...
...Those "Buy Your Lamb Chops at Mike's Market" pitches will make Madison Avenue broadcasting seem like the Golden Age of TV...
...A more fitting punishment for Kahn than a jail term, if he is truly guilty, would be five years of watching cable television...
...What disturbs The Committee for a Free Irving Kahn most is the harsh sentence imposed by Judge Constance Baker Motley...
...But in 1966 he wanted to give the people of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the advantages of cable TV that could come with granting Tele-Prompter an exclusive franchise...
...Most TV stations in the country tend to run the same shows...
...Hollywood producers have traditionally taken advantage of the open marketplace to pander to the worst possible public taste...
...The American people probably won't wake up to the fact that cable TV has already gone down the tube until they see the cable-originated school board meetings being interrupted every 10 minutes for local commercials...
...Of course, there are traditional legal scholars who say 'extortion' means 'money given under the threat of bodily harm.' In this case, all the threats were to harm the corporate body...
...Pay TV is another guarantee for diversity the Sloan Commission is enthusiastic about, and with good reason...
...So for now, while the cable fortunes are being made, we'll have to view the situation with a sense of historical perspective and be content in the knowledge that our children will have diversity in programming...
Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 1
