by Lisa Napoli
Like Reese, Coors believed greater competition in the news business would yield more stories and more points of view, which could only translate into good news for democracy. But to Coors, that involved promoting a conservative agenda to offset what he felt was the left-leaning slant of the networks. In service of that goal, he hired a young Republican political operative and wily public relations man named Roger Ailes as his news director. Ailes boasted that while he’d never before run a newsroom, he’d been around them and surely had the common sense to learn.
The purist Reese was offended by this cocky man’s very presence, especially after he made it clear that he intended to keep running his public relations business (and using TVN to promote his clients). Reese and the majority of his TVN colleagues staunchly believed that journalism wasn’t supposed to come with a point of view. At the same time, he had a family to feed and considered himself lucky to be employed, especially by a deep-pocketed organization.
Early in the year, Reese had spotted a page-one story in the New York Times that ignited the flames of hope inside him. At long last, the first private, domestic communications satellite in the United States had been launched. Only a technology aficionado and news-hawk like him could completely understand the implications of this development.
Since Telstar had soared into the heavens over a decade before, a number of companies had been experimenting with the groundbreaking tool. After years of regulatory deliberation and pushback from the networks and AT&T, satellites were finally ready for business. Not only would they radically reduce the cost of transmitting information, they would prove more reliable, too. This was sure to drive down costs and, finally, encourage competition. Never before had it been possible to reach a national audience without the gateway of the networks and the phone company.
Reese rushed to share the news of this “chance to break the AT&T leash” with the deep-pocketed ideologue for whom he worked. Sending TVN’s daily feed via satellite would ultimately save millions of dollars and give Coors bragging rights as the first television outfit to deliver news in this revolutionary new way.
The beer mogul signed on to the plan. But this was only a piece of the equation. To pull down the news segments TVN fed up, TVN members would need special equipment. That meant installing a thirty-foot-wide government-approved satellite dish whose price matched its gigantic footprint: $100,000. Recognizing that most local television stations were unlikely to invest in such unwieldy technology, Coors agreed to subsidize the cost.
Eager to plunge in, Reese hopped a ride south to visit Scientific Atlanta, the only company in the nation to be constructing these strange-looking, clam-shaped “earth stations” at that time.
Sid Topol, the firm’s president, knew the networks were right to fear the democratization of television that satellites would allow. After spending his entire engineering career on the development of radar and microwave systems, he was certain that this new technology offered an elegant solution to the complex, invisible limitation of terrestrial TV—that satellites were the future of broadcasting. So sure was he about their impending success that he’d redirected his entire business to making receiver dishes necessary for cable operators to pull down the signals.
He was tantalized by the prospect of an infusion of $12 million of Coors “beer money” and eager to do business with Reese, who needed no hard sell of the technology he was peddling. The industry was otherwise filled with skeptics who didn’t believe satellites could possibly be reliable or who were simply afraid to or unable to make the first move.
To date, only one firm commitment had been made to link cable to satellites. Gerald Levin, the president of an upstart subscription cable entertainment channel in the northeast called Home Box Office, planned to distribute his fledgling service via satellite as soon as the FCC signed off on his plans. Along with the financial might of his parent company, Time, Inc., he had the backing of two of the nation’s largest cable operators. The entire industry had lit up at this announcement and eagerly waited for the debut.
Perhaps Reese would be Topol’s next taker. Topol fetched him from the airport, asking if he’d mind stopping off along the way to visit another of his potential customers. Ted Turner, he explained, the owner of Atlanta’s UHF channel 17, had also inquired about pricing. After reading in the trades and hearing from his allies in cable about this HBO development, Ted had some questions.
Reese knew all about Ted. His channel 17 was becoming industry legend. Reese had been trying to convince him to subscribe to his news service, to no avail. There was no room on the station for news, he’d been told.
For his part, Topol knew Reese had been wading through the ever-changing rules and regulations governing the emerging technology. Anyone interested in fighting the networks needed to stick together. The more media people who signed on to satellites, the better.
Now the two men found themselves climbing the stairs of the tired-looking channel 17 building, laboring to pull open the heavy fire door to Ted’s receiving area. His secretary buzzed them into a wood-paneled office, filled floor to ceiling with bookcases jammed with nautical paraphernalia. The place looked more like a suburban den than the enclave of a broadcaster. Running this business clearly hadn’t prevented Ted from continuing to sail competitively, and judging by the dozens of silver trophies that gleamed on the shelves of his bookcases, this was no idle pursuit.
The proprietor himself matched his decor. The filthy railroad conductor’s cap perched on his head—his good luck totem for sailing—made him look like an insolent frat boy after a night of partying, not the innovative impresario he fancied himself to be. The carpet was stained, and the blinds were yellowed with age. An ornately framed plaque on his messy desk declared outsize confidence for such shabbiness: EITHER LEAD, FOLLOW OR GET OUT OF THE WAy.
The mess repelled Reese, an urbane sophisticate who proudly worked in an office high above Columbus Circle. Having elevated himself from Newark to Manhattan, he felt he’d made it to the center of the media universe—even if, in truth, the media universe in which he dwelled was adjacent to the true power of television. He certainly was more plugged in than this yahoo cracker. What kind of money could Ted really have? And what could he possibly want, or do, with access to a satellite?
“How much does space on one of those satellites cost?” Ted asked his visitors, as if such a purchase was as inconsequential as a bag of chewing tobacco.
Reese explained that buying time on a transponder, satellite-speak for “channel,” would cost roughly a million dollars a year.
Turner sniffed dismissively. “Is that all?”
As they made their way out back to the parking lot, Reese sniffed back. Nobody in the media world would take this guy—nor his joke of a station, in a joke of a city—seriously. Even conservative brewer Joseph Coors had the sense not to have located his news service in his home base of Colorado.
“Can you imagine that asshole Turner,” he said to Topol as the men made their way back to the parking lot, “thinking he’s going to put his rinky-dink channel on satellite?”
1 The morning of this special day, the only regularly scheduled, nationally televised morning television show, NBC’s Today, took to the airwaves an hour earlier than usual as the event unfolded live in London. Host Dave Garroway treated viewers to the only images available: still photos of the queen ticked off a state-of-the-art Mufax wire machine at nine minutes’ transmission time each. Occasionally, he’d cut away to radio coverage from the scene or chat up experts on the royal family who joined him in-studio. Wide shots of Garroway’s “co-host,” the chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs, gazing at images of the queen on a monitor proved a matter of wicked irreverence later decried in the House of Commons—as was CBS’s sale of coronation coverage to a car company sponsor that declared its vehicle “Queen of the Road.”
2 In fact, the Zapruder film did not air on local television in Chicago until 1970, and then on national television in 1975.
3 A month late
r, Reinhardt bought another film from an amateur cameraman named Orville Nix. The cost: $5,000 and a fedora requested by Mr. Nix. The film became the centerpiece of conspiracy theorists who believed another gunman had sniped at the president from street level. For more see Schonfeld’s essay “The Shadow of a Gunman,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 1975.
CHAPTER FOUR
Watch This Channel Grow!
Ted’s intrigue with the satellite was the capstone of an unprecedented ride. By force of will, a spirit of invention, well-placed geography, and extremely fortunate timing, he had managed to transform channel 17 from “shit to shinola,” as he described it, in just a few short years.
Even before he’d coaxed the station out of the graveyard for which it had been headed, Ted had been determined to imbue the place with the guiding positive spirit of Planet Hope. A catchy slogan invented by some gal in promotions helped jazz up the station’s on-air image.
“Super 17!”
The phone typically rang at the front desk of channel 17 a couple of dozen times before anyone answered it, but when a caller finally got through, they’d find themselves greeted by a cheerful, almost seductive voice.
“Super 17!”
To compete with the more powerful and better funded network affiliates in Atlanta, “lunatic fringe” dwelling WTCG had to boost its signal and aggressively counter-program. This ad from the Atlanta Constitution in 1971 was just one prong of Ted’s strategy to infiltrate the market.
WTCG, Ted now claimed, stood for a Herculean dare: Watch This Channel Grow. Though its fortunes began to change, the place was still a ragtag dump. Even the rented television on display in the front lobby, a visitor’s first impression of the place, screamed poor. Ted refused to toss out a three-legged chair, hoping, in looking downtrodden, people would give him a better deal.
Once, the grand antenna out back blew up, all but knocking the station off the air for three weeks. After its repair, it continued to conk out on a regular basis, setting off an alarm bell inside that alerted the engineer, who’d taken to sleeping in his office in order to attend the signal. Just getting safely into the building in the winter required an act of heroism—or, at least, a helmet. Used tires layered on the roof cushioned the chunks of ice that would plunge down from the tower precipitously after a storm. The padding did nothing to protect the cars parked in the lot, much less anyone trying to cross it. To date, miraculously, there had been no human casualties.
The first rung in the climb toward “super” occurred when the owner of WATL, the hastily launched rival UHF station, got tired of bleeding cash and unceremoniously pulled its own plug. It was a year after Ted had arrived in local television. Had the competition lasted just two more weeks, he said, he would have been the one closing down.
So thrilled was he to see channel 17 suddenly move from fifth of five in the market to fourth of four that he’d taken to the airwaves after a rerun of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with a live on-air “Thank you, Atlanta” party. Thank you for what? his employees wondered. The competition had been a killer, but Ted, in all his egomaniacal, hyper-competitive splendor, converted its sudden demise into a personal victory. Such brass, said his production chief. After thanking everyone out there in “television land,” he roved around the tiny studio he’d had filled with balloons, putting each of his employees on the spot. “Tell me about your family. How long have you been working for WTCG?” They cringed. The only thing that helped them all get through the two-hour ordeal was getting high.
Then came word that “victory” might be short-lived—that a prospective buyer for WATL, a movie theater chain, had expressed interest in resuscitating it. Irate about this possible incursion, Ted grabbed a flight up to the would-be competition’s corporate headquarters in Boston and threatened that if they dared to enter the market, they’d never get their hands on his billboards for promotion. To ratchet up the drama, he writhed on the floor like a man in his death throes. Perhaps scared off by this crazy southerner, the company pulled out of the deal, leaving him where he wanted to be—the sole UHF station in the market.
That mighty arsenal of billboards, 15 percent of which sat unused at any given time, proved to be a powerful asset worth keeping to himself. Papering the fallow boards with ads for “Super 17” displayed to everyone in town that he meant business.
Wasted space—wasted anything—drove Ted crazy. It made zero sense why television stations ceased transmission each night, culminating the broadcast day with film of a fluttering American flag as the national anthem played. After that? Nothing but a test pattern—darkness until the sunrise harkened the start of the next broadcast day.
The response he got to the question “Why do we go off the air overnight?” was the kind of lazy explanation that drove him bonkers: “Because that’s how it’s always been done.” What about nurses, pipe fitters, milkmen, pharmacists—him? The world didn’t revolve around a nine-to-five workday. Why should television? And what about insomniacs, him among them, who could be soothed by a middle-of-the-night viewing of a forgotten film? To this salesman, sacrificing one-third of the clock was like throwing dollar bills out the window.
“We can’t afford to do things like everybody else!” he shouted in response. “We’ve got to do things differently. We’ve gotta be like a cleaners that’s opened seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. You’ve got to be open all the time.”1
Staying on all night might not yield an immediate financial return, but it made no sense to continue keeping the lights off overnight. In search of every scrap of audience possible, channel 17 became the first television station in the country to embark on a round-the-clock broadcasting schedule.
Up in Charlotte at Ted’s other station, WRET—bleeding $50,000 a month—the projections were even bleaker. Commercials barely commanded $25 each, versus $800 for a spot over at the competition—and they still were a tough sell. Management was found to be swindling from the station, and the producers of a religious show that bought airtime were stealing equipment. If the place didn’t turn around, it could very well capsize the entire Turnerverse. (Should the whole thing go belly-up, Ted consoled himself with inventive exit fantasies: working as a boat hand in Annapolis, or packing his family up and heading to Australia, where he could open a McDonald’s.)
The prayer break held by the station manager at ten a.m. daily didn’t seem to improve matters. WRET needed to snap to life, like Dead Ernest, the campy, drawling vampire who rose from a coffin to introduce the weekly horror flick, Friday Night Frights.2 Absent intervention by the divine or supernatural, a desperate Ted seized the crazy suggestion from his channel 17 station manager, Sid Pike, to reach directly to the viewers in a “beg-a-thon.” Over and over for a week, the owner himself appealed to viewers to please donate the price of two movie tickets. By keeping WRET on the air, he told them, they’d be guaranteed sixteen hundred free movies a year:
I pledge to you that every dollar will be used to pay the bills we incur to bring you these programs. If there is a surplus, we will enlarge our film library to bring you more and better movies and other programs not shown on the other stations. I wanted to give you shares of stock in the station, but it is illegal to sell stock on TV. I would like for you to consider this a loan. Please include your name and address with your contributions because, if we are ever able to, I promise to pay you back with interest. A check would be best for your records and ours.
Disarmed by this Rhett Butler–esque character unafraid to confess his dire straits, and eager for the stream of old movies and reruns WRET offered, the dutiful audience obediently answered the command. Donations arrived, from a quarter to eighty bucks. Some fans even hand-delivered the loot directly to the studios, which took some work, for the station was situated far from the center of Charlotte, across from a cow pasture. The $26,000 collected in the beg-a-thon was just enough for WRET to get over the hump. The pleading brought in almost as much in new ad revenue and attracted the attention of religious broadc
aster Pat Robertson, who wished to buy time for his programs.
Back in Atlanta, Ted scored other programming coups. Picking up reruns of the popular mainstay about a small-town southern sheriff, The Andy Griffith Show, helped put Super 17 on the map. Wresting away the rights to produce and air Georgia Championship Wrestling was another major score. The suits at the other stations in town might laugh at the down-market theatrics of the faux sport, but it sure was a crowd-pleaser—the highest-rated program produced in Atlanta, Ted pointed out, beating the number one local newscast by 50 percent. Every week for the taping, the tiny studios jammed up with fans.
The ultimate “get” came when Ted swooped in and stole the rights from market leader WSB, an NBC affiliate, to a more respectable sport—baseball. The executives there, he declared, had been “asleep at the switch” when he made an offer that the owners of the Atlanta Braves couldn’t resist—to air three times as many games. As an unaffiliated independent, channel 17’s airtime was his blank slate to do with as he pleased. For Ted, this sport about which he knew next to nothing was the perfect time-filler. Now he could also brag about being the first UHF station to carry Major League Baseball.
Add to the mix: Roller Derby. Boxing. Deals to broadcast the Atlanta Hawks (basketball) and Flames (hockey). Regional college football. Off-network reruns like I Love Lucy (twice a day) and Hogan’s Heroes. And a continuous flow of old films movie companies practically gave away—dogs most viewers hadn’t seen in the theaters—Deep Valley, The Bride Wore Boots, Seven Days Leave, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, Gold Diggers of 1933, The Silver Chalice. While Ted dashed off to sail, which kept him away for weeks and sometimes months at a time, station manager Pike sat before a calendar and strategized how to use these building blocks to counterprogram the competition. On Monday nights during fall football season, for instance, he’d run a romance or a drama to appeal to non–football fans. When the other stations aired something serious, he’d play the Marx Brothers.
