Raunch on the Rise
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television RAUNCH ON THE RISE BY REUVEN FRANK on June 19, in a large but elegant hotel conference room at a Colorado ski resort, a 36-year-old Harvard MBA named Stephen Chao made a...
...In addition, each network had its own department called Standards and Practices, or Program Practices, or some such...
...Slick men's magazines that aim to "set the agenda" for young Americans, mostly by treating television too solemnly, took him to their hearts...
...Chao's point, according to subsequent gossip, was that we are more upset by nudity, or sex, than by violence and murder...
...Cited to make this case are some direct and conscious lies...
...An ABC sales executive told Business Week last spring that "advertisers would deem Fox' on-the-edge programming offensive if it aired on one of the Big Three networks...
...The top managers of the Fox Broadcasting Company, one of its middle-sized components, were there along with the boss himself...
...Popular as raunchiness may be and it is...
...On assuming his latest post, Sauter agreed with his new boss that the three major networks' newscasts all looked alike, but refused to say what, if anything, he would do differently...
...If he gets one, it may one day come to television, probably network television...
...it is...
...citizen...
...and slanted news coverage of Britain's last election, culminating, on Election Day, with the front page headline: "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights...
...He is reported to be planning a nightly network newscast and a network news magazine program...
...When the day came for WWOR-TV and Howard Stem to make an agreement for 1992-93, both sides were eager...
...CBS has launched a new series called Freshman Dorm (Wednesdays, 8:00p.m...
...Finally, I should note that although Fox' programs have a lot of sex, they do not seem to have a great deal of violence...
...Yet the same advertisers, or others much like them, ultimately do buy commercials on those Fox shows, and eventually the major networks imitate them and the advertisers come along...
...Their argument for relaxing standards was that network audiences were being drained away by the less constrained cable channels...
...One of the Fox network's "on-the-edge" programs is Married With Children, a blue-collar comedy about a couple and their two children that uses almost all the marginal words for body and sexual functions, is as full of jokes about personal odors and smelly feet as a British music hall, and includes direct references to the sexual activities of the parents and ambitions of the children...
...Despite some environmental cliches thrown in for social cachet, the show is mostly about boys and girls without much clothing, not about going to class, except for episodes that focus on making out with the instructor...
...It was the advertisers who drew the line...
...No one doubted its popularity could be duplicated anywhere in the United States...
...As for Stephen Chao, whoever knows what he is doing is not talking...
...WWOR-TV put him on just before midnight Saturdays...
...That may be because violence is expensive...
...However grotesque the presentation, he had a valid case, and it is too bad that he never got to fully develop it...
...The problem was advertisers...
...It sold out...
...A An example of advertisers guarding the frontiers of taste that does not involve Fox is the recent rupture between a New York station, WWOR-TV, and Howard Stern, who talks nonstop scatology and shock on his own radio show...
...they are now conditioned to accept these goings-on...
...Another is In Living Color, an almost-all-black musical variety program supposedly reflecting inner city lifestyles and vocabulary...
...Uniformly negative reviews notwithstanding, Freshman has a full quota of advertisers...
...Two more borderline shows, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, concern achingly clean-cut young white people of substantial means who worry excessively about their sexual functions and prospects...
...the Sun's headline "GOTCHA...
...The Federal courts threw out the code 10 years ago, prompting the networks first to fire their monitoring departments and then, after many loud protests, to revive them, albeit in weaker form...
...The first step, though, has been taken: On July 13, Murdoch announced that he had hired Van Gordon Sauter to replace Chao as president of Fox News...
...For instance, if there are eight commercial minutes in an hour, each station will sell four minutes locally, while the syndicator sells the other four minutes to national advertisers whose commercials appear in every city where the program is shown...
...A former reporter for the National Enquirer, he had risen rapidly in the Murdoch organization and was vice president for acquisitions at the time of his most recent promotion...
...Esquire opined that he "embodies the kind of dangerously unexamined populism that is so prevalent in America today...
...This is the same Rupert Murdoch whose cash flow is fed by a London tabloid he brought to prominence and wealth with a daily diet of exposed female chests...
...Whether the Fox network will do the same with news as its proprietor's other property is hard to judge, because there is as yet no Fox network news...
...Since leaving CBS, he has been associated with syndicated programs, including a supposedly fact-based medical series that used re-enactments, and Jesse Jackson's interview show...
...Once he became popular, it was inevitable that he would try television, or it him...
...Sauter used to be president of CBS News...
...Law and Hill Street Blues, produces an amiable ABC comedy series about a boy so brilliant he becomes a practicing physician while in his teens...
...Then he founded America's fourth commercial TV network, which is distinguished for the limits of taste it is willing to ignore...
...They did not want their products "associated" with it...
...Bochco told the New York Times that it was okay for Doogie Howser, the boy doctor, to lose his virginity "only if the actual deflowering took place off-screen...
...In the words of a major vice president of a major advertising agency, this program and the ones that are sure to follow are "advertiser-safe.'' What does "advertiser-safe" mean...
...The people he sees doing television news, Murdoch said, do not seem to be real journalists practicing real journalism...
...If you can accept that premise, you can also accept an episode about the boy doctor's sexual initiation...
...He also interviewed women in bikinis, cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, and massage parlor masseuses...
...None of the preceding is meant to denigrate the competence of execution...
...Inside every pornographer, it seems, there is a puritan struggling to get out...
...GivenMurdoch's record with the Sun in London, not to mention the New York Post, the National Star and other tabloids in the United States, his statement raises intriguing possibilities as he, or Sauter, pursues "real" journalism...
...Much of that wealth went to buying some television stations in this country??requiring him to give up his Australian nationality and become a U.S...
...National advertisers would not buy time in the Stern program...
...The deal fell apart...
...As president of CBS News Sauter hired a former Miss America, Phyllis George, whose dilettantism on the morning news program caused embarrassment to the network and hilarity elsewhere...
...In entertainment, Fox already leads the industry in raunch.As a matter of fact, it is a sort of pioneer the older networks observe avidly, for where Fox goes they will soon be able to follow...
...Murdoch's Sun, with the largest daily circulation in Britain, has been accused by one of London's "quality" newspapers of having "debauched British press standards" and of bringing forth "political threats to introduce statutory controls on press freedom...
...The Sun was one of two London newspapers to use pictures of the Duchess of York without her bikini top, printing 300,000 extra copies...
...when the British Navy sank the Argentine ship Belgrano, with hundreds aboard...
...As he spoke, on stage behind him a well-built young man undressed until he was naked...
...Among the outside guests was Defense Secretary Dick Cheney...
...advertisers worry about being "associated" with it...
...Is that restriction temporary, or will on-screen defloration become "advertiser-safe" in due time thanks, presumably, to Fox...
...What has happened, predictably, is that now, more than ever, standards are being set by advertisers...
...There his persona involved living on a houseboat, sporting a Smith Brothers beard, wearing work boots, and getting around in a chauffeur-driven jeep...
...There used to be a code of the tolerable that everybody followed, administered by the National Association of Broadcasters...
...The wives present included Anna Murdoch and Lynne Cheney, Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...Before that he was president of CBS Sports, and before that he ran CBS' TV station in Los Angeles...
...On Television RAUNCH ON THE RISE BY REUVEN FRANK on June 19, in a large but elegant hotel conference room at a Colorado ski resort, a 36-year-old Harvard MBA named Stephen Chao made a presentation to a management seminar of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch's Australia-based media behemoth...
...In syndication, the usual pattern is to let stations agreeing to carry the program have it for no fee, and to split the sale of total commercial time...
...Murdoch has been personally involved in running the Fox television network since the resignation last year of his chief executive, Barry Diller...
...Chao, who just days earlier had been appointed president of both Fox television and the about-to-be born Fox News, was dealing with taste and censorship...
...He has also spent a term as CBS' program censor...
...Speaking to a convention of Fox' affiliated stations, Murdoch appeared to set forth Sauter's mandate...
...Steven Bochco, one of the few geniuses to wander into the business, creator in whole or in part of L.A...
...Howard Stern, meanwhile, is said to be looking for a movie...
...Variety says Stern was paid $10,000 a program...
...If it is successful enough, it may inspire a TV series...
...They both anticipated that the program could go into syndication??that is, be sold to stations around the country, not through network distribution but individually...
...Pay cable, especially, was taking audiences from free television by showing movies uncut, nudity, violence and all...
...Advertisers will find it safe, because standards will have further declined by then...
...inaco-ed university dormitory...
...He used severely handicapped people, too, racing each other or just talking to him, and claimed to be doing good by treating them as "normal" human beings...
...But Murdoch made Chao's point for him by firing him that day...
...What has it come to mean...
...Reportedly, Chao had to forgo a staged killing, since the Defense Secretary is attended by armed bodyguards, and it is imprudent to shoot even blanks in their presence...
...His patter and language were the same as on radio...
...Nevertheless, he fired Stephen Chao for using a male stripper as a prop...
...It has become time for the self-styled Big Three networks to imitate...
...He was on several covers...
Vol. 75 • September 1992 • No. 11
