On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television THE CBS FOOTBALL FUMBLE BY REUVEN FRANK TELEVISION'S end-of-an-era du jour for January 23 was the CBS broadcast of Dallas trouncing San Francisco and winning the right to play in...
...after the late news, a few stations showed old movies and the rest shut down before NBC presented Tonight with Steve Allen—then Jack Paar, then Johnny Carson...
...babble and good works were nudged to the fringes...
...This was the infamous "blackout" rule...
...Network stations had that to brag about when they asked the Federal Communications Commission every three years to renew their broadcasting licenses...
...TV people believe that the viewers who watched football were by and large the ones who watched 60 Minutes—mostly male, young but not very, etc...
...The games of half the league, the National Football Conference (NFC), were on CBS, while NBC carried the American Football Conference (AFC), the league's newer half...
...The big gainer is Fox, however, and the big loser is CBS...
...For one thing, the owners eventually learned that a game on TV sells seats for the following games, not the reverse...
...If Congress saw fit to intercede in the blackout matter, how much more exercised would it become at the threat of Pay TV...
...A large part of the answer has to do with the strange, possibly unique, place of professional football in American life...
...It was CBS' last National Football League (NFL) contest after 38 years...
...Many Sundays, the game ends after 7. That makes the next program begin late, and every program following...
...At least, that is the argument...
...Yet, as any defensive lineman will tell you, autre temps, autre moeurs...
...The CBS schedule after football was 60 Minutes, a mystery and a (costly) weekly movie...
...American journalists often fret about the way Murdoch runs the New York Post or the Boston Herald, but rarely consider his control of many media...
...It all started when there were fewer stations, and TV did not fill every hour of the day or night...
...Moreover, it will gain affiliates in cities where it has none, welcome affiliates with stronger signals to replace those it now has with weak signals, and affiliates in the VHF spectrum (Channels 2-13) to replace some of the 120...
...In Britain, where he owns the establishment paper, the Times, and the most popular tabloid, the Sun, journalists are terrified of him...
...The NFL goes back more than 38 years, but until CBS started carrying its games every Sunday attendance was meager, players were poorly compensated and held second jobs, and sports writers gave pro football less space than college football—or baseball, hockey, horse-racing, golf, even tennis...
...Sunday evening is peculiar in the structure and economics of networks...
...Their most significant intervention came when the league ruled that any game for which more than a certain percentage of seats in the stadium was unsold could not be shown in the city where it was being played...
...The champions of the two conferences meet in the Super Bowl, a national ritual...
...Then CBS fixed pro football in American culture, giving birth to Joe Six-Pack, a cartoon figure disdained at cocktail parties...
...On Sunday afternoons this coming fall, NBC will continue to carry the AFC games, while the NFC games will be on Fox...
...One succeeded...
...Come September, the football audience will flow to the 7 p.m...
...Perhaps, simply, Fox thought it had more to gain than CBS thought it had to lose...
...Among Murdoch's properties are newspapers in Australia and Britain and the United States and Hong Kong, 20th Century Fox and Fox Television, book publishers here and there, and lots more...
...This explains why a news report about a contract negotiation is a frontpage story...
...He came out of Australia, like Attila riding out of the arid steppes of Asia, or Philip and his son Alexander from the backward villages of rural Macedon, to subjugate the effete cities and civilizations of his time...
...Synthetic or not, it has become its own kind of shared experience...
...As Fox establishes a sports staff, hiring away CBS' best known announcers and commentators and combing the field for the technical professionals who are experienced in this specialized business, there is some doubt about what will happen next...
...that is, the commercials it sells will total less than the rights fees and production costs...
...It has the highest "sets in use" reported by Nielsen: More people watch television on Sunday night than on any other...
...program on Fox...
...Last summer, sports executives from both CBS and NBC had been noising it about that the money they were paying the NFL for television rights was getting to be more than earnings justified...
...The next contract, or the one after, seems certain to take professional football into Pay TV Television insiders with great experience insist that cannot happen...
...When that happens, the choice will not be to watch or not to watch...
...Owners had to appear before Congressional committees and were threatened with punitive legislation...
...Thus, over one quarter of a network's prime time income is earned on Sunday night...
...They reason that Congress will not allow it...
...But NBC also gains...
...There are now indeed four networks...
...In that atmosphere, who can keep NFL football off Pay TV...
...Although NBC had wanted to reduce its fee to the NFL, it ended up paying $138 million more for four years...
...The stations Fox owns have risen in value, perhaps doubled...
...it has in the UHF spectrum...
...But—every Fox station will make more money selling commercials next to football games, and people who never watched the fourth network, with its declared orientation to "young people" and unorthodox programs, will watch it now...
...The coup was front-page news, even in the New York Times...
...You don't hear much about the blackout rule anymore...
...So the walls of the intellectual ghetto tumbled down...
...Fox is the newest and smallest...
...Sunday afternoons were given over to discussion and disquisition, solemnity and earnestness, the "intellectual ghetto...
...That is why, when a trade paper asked executives to name a recent year's most important program, elder statesman Michael Dann picked football runovers...
...It will be of interest to its fans, but to few others...
...It will take Fox a long time to equal the audience the CBS powerhouse put together...
...it will be to pay or not to pay...
...No one believed them...
...Add football on Sunday afternoons, with at least part of the network carrying a game that begins at 4 p.m...
...A game ending after 7 was usually exciting, like the recent one between New York and Dallas that went into overtime...
...But if pro football owed the network that spawned it nothing, what does it owe free television itself...
...NBC signed the American Football League for its own Sunday afternoons...
...The special position of professional football in the society will erode...
...When I asked about the danger of letting the government into the news business, they answered, "Ah, but you don't know Rupert...
...As the layers of the onion are unpeeled, the way television really works is being exposed: what matters and what doesn't when network executives make decisions, and how different the process is from what outsiders imagine...
...The immediate prospect of minor tectonic shifting among the networks is obvious, but with the whole television universe changing so rapidly, that may be only a very small part of what we can expect...
...What it owed CBS counted for nothing when it came to negotiating a contract...
...Nor will its contractual arrangements be front page news to America's newspaper of record...
...There is no reason it should have...
...AFC cities tend to be smaller than NFC cities, so NBC's football earned less than CBS' and the fee paid to the NFL was smaller...
...On Television THE CBS FOOTBALL FUMBLE BY REUVEN FRANK TELEVISION'S end-of-an-era du jour for January 23 was the CBS broadcast of Dallas trouncing San Francisco and winning the right to play in the Super Bowl...
...I have met several who want the government to "do something" about Murdoch...
...There have been attempts to play American pro football abroad, especially in Europe and Japan, to stimulate a taste for it...
...Pro football made Sunday afternoons profitable...
...Mornings offered little to watch until Today dawned on NBC...
...NBC expects to get some of that, and is already asking higher rates for its commercials...
...So far, it remains only an exotic novelty, even though the smallest of Britain's TV channels plays tapes of some NFL games to appreciative, if tiny, audiences...
...Almost at once, the NFL and the AFL merged to become the conferences of the National Football League...
...The sports director of BSkyB, David Hill, an Australian, has been named president of Fox Sports...
...The NFL also schedules a game every week on Monday, providing ABC with its hugely successful Monday Night Football...
...He owns the British multichannel satellite TV service, BSkyB, which reaches all of Western Europe and is doing the same in East Asia, including China, from Hong Kong...
...It is also the one owned by Rupert Murdoch, the only genuine global media mogul...
...Either the upcoming contract renewal talks would see a reduction, they said, or they might have to do without pro football...
...NBC, especially under Pat Weaver, was the better at devising what the trade calls "dayparts...
...The estimate is a $700 million loss...
...In 1994, if the Giants and Dallas go into overtime, it will be on Fox...
...Late in the negotiations, along came Fox TV The upstart fourth network outbid CBS, which had made pro football an American icon...
...Why CBS let this happen is still unclear...
...You can see the place of pro football in American life in the way Senators and Representatives step in to protect their constituencies against the rapacity of the team owners and the league...
...The big question is where professional football, an established, institutionalized, multi-billion-dollar business, will go...
...Few who were watching switched to another network at 7. The same was true at 8, with 60 Minutes not yet up to Andy Rooney, or at 9, with the mystery still unsolved...
...It earned no income, only prestige...
...Fox bid $1.56 billion, about $400 million more than CBS did, for four years of NFC games...
...In the jargon, that audience "flowed" to 60 Minutes...
...Part of the communications revolution we keep being told we are about to go through—the unspoken part—is that it will all be Pay TV Whatever wonder is described, whatever magic tool is miraculously placed in our eager hands, will show up on next month's phone bill...
...They all helped CBS' expensive movie...
...It will almost certainly lose money...
...Everyone knew CBS was gun-shy after overbidding $600 million on a four-year major league baseball package that just ended, yet that does not seem reason enough...
...Having brought his fledgling American network into the big leagues with the purchase of professional football, will Murdoch try to make it an international sport—like soccer everywhere except here...
...In addition, prime time is four hours on Sunday and only three the rest of the week...
...In any case, why all the fuss...
...Within television itself, though, it has a different importance...
...A parade of competing leagues tried to horn in on the NFL's growing affluence...
...certainly no longer to almost all Americans...
Vol. 77 • January 1994 • No. 1
