by Ben Shapiro
Despite the play in the numbers, the vagaries in determining the “value” viewer, the pure guesswork that is television programming, networks continue to rely almost exclusively on the numbers—and they use them as a cover to justify their programming decisions.
Ratings supposedly trump everything. But in reality, executives aren’t all about the ratings, as we’ll discuss shortly—they were fine with All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and The Smothers Brothers for political as well as financial reasons, as shown by the fact that each of those programs started off with low ratings. But the numbers continue to provide a convenient, if flawed, cover for the market argument. And it’s all due to that true Hollywood story, the con job that took over the entire advertising industry.
HOLE NUMBER TWO: TELEVISION’S BUSINESSMEN COLLUDE
I own a fruit stand. You own a fruit stand. Our fruit stands are across the street from each other. And in the center of the street stands a hungry kid.
If I want that hungry kid to buy from my fruit stand, I lower my prices and raise my quality. I undercut you. You try to do the same. That’s how competition in the free market is supposed to work.
Now suppose that there are two people in the center of the street: a hungry kid and a hungry adult. Suppose also that the hungry kid wants an orange and the hungry adult wants an apple. As the fruit stand owner, I have two choices. First, I can try to undercut your fruit stand by selling both cheap apples and cheap oranges. That would create competition, just as in the first scenario.
Second, I can walk across the street and make a deal with you: You’ll sell apples and I’ll sell oranges. We’ll fix the prices on each so that we can each make a decent profit. Instead of competing and lowering our own profit margins in order to draw customers, we’ll instead have higher prices and distinct goods that we sell.
The television industry embraces this second idea with fervor. Television channels do not compete with each other; they involve themselves in a soft form of collusion. That’s why we’ve got Lifetime, which boasts the slogan “Television for Women,” and Spike, previously known as the “First Network for Men.” That’s why we’ve got TNT, which specializes in drama, and Comedy Central, which specializes in raunchy riotousness. That’s why there’s Logo, catering to gay audiences, and ESPN, which caters mainly to straight male sports fans.
The television executives call this diversity of programming. They say that narrowcasting on cable has created a plethora of viewing options for the public. But how many times have you sat down on your couch, flipped through your 350-plus channels, and asked yourself, “How the hell is there nothing to watch?”
Very often, there’s nothing to watch because there’s no variety within genres. If you’re a young male, you’re basically herded towards one of a few channels. You’re not going to be visiting Oxygen, nor are you going to be checking out E! Your choices are quite limited, due to both government regulations that make competition in the television sphere virtually impossible, and vertical integration, which has put several major studios in charge of all programming.
Governmental regulations have restricted the number of networks available—ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox all had to go through extensive legal hoops in order to build their businesses. Such barriers to entry make free and open competition virtually impossible. Not only that—the vast amount of cash required to buy up the affiliates necessary to broadcast original programming on a national scale is prohibitive.
Such monopoly becomes even more obvious when we look to the cable television industry, which is largely owned by the same players. Originally, as Clint Bolick of the Hoover Institution and the Goldwater Institute writes, the FCC heavily regulated the nascent cable industry, hoping to alleviate “unfair competition” complaints from rival media services. When the FCC finally backed off, the local governments picked up the regulatory slack. “Nearly every community in the United States allows only a single cable company to operate within its borders,” wrote Bolick in 1984.69 As of 1998, almost 100 percent of cable markets in the country had only one cable company active in them. Meanwhile, customers paid the price: “An FCC survey found that cable systems with monopolies charged an average of 65 cents a channel per month while those that faced competition charged only 48 cents per month.”70 Satellite TV has alleviated this situation somewhat, but continued federal and local regulations make it nearly impossible for any competition to exist among cable companies—a situation that pleases current cable companies and their corporate owners no end.
Vertical integration has also crowded out competition in the marketplace. There are currently six companies that own virtually all of the major television channels in existence, as well as the distribution systems. All six have heavy relations with the government due to their size, contributing to their tendency toward programming liberalism.
General Electric. GE owns NBC and all of its spinoffs (MSNBC, CNBC, etc.), the History Channel and its spinoffs, A&E, the Biography Channel, Bravo, USA Network, SyFy, Oxygen, Chiller, Hallmark channel, Sundance channel, and Telemundo, among others. It also owns television production giant Universal Television and movie production giant Universal Studios and its subsidiaries. (More consolidation is on the horizon: Comcast, the cable operator, is looking to buy most of these holdings—and Comcast already owns E!, Versus, the Golf Channel, etc.)
Time Warner. The company that bought up Ted Turner’s outfit owns CNN and its spinoffs, HBO and its spinoffs, Cinemax, Cartoon Network, TNT, TBS, Turner Classic Movies, and CW. Like GE, it also owns several major production companies, including all of Warner Bros. (which in turn owns New Line Cinema, Castle Rock Entertainment, Hanna Barbera, and WB). Time Warner also owns Time Warner Cable.
The Walt Disney Company. The great American success story that is the Mouse House now owns ABC and its spinoffs, including ABC Family, ESPN and its spinoffs, and Disney Channel. It also owns equity in Lifetime, A&E, the History channel, the Biography channel, and several other channels. It is an equity partner in Hulu, the online source for television content, along with GE and NewsCorp. Its production companies include Touchstone, Miramax, and Marvel Studios.
News Corporation. News Corp., Rupert Murdoch’s outfit, is smaller in television than most of the other groups. It owns Fox, of course, as well as Fox News, the Fox Movie Channel, FX, National Geographic, and Fox Sports, among others. It, too, has its own set of production companies, as well as all the subsidiaries of 20th Century Fox. News Corp. also owns a large chunk of DirecTV.
CBS Corporation. The only major television corporation that began in the industry, CBS owns half of CW, as well as Showtime, and the Movie Channel. CBS Television Studios are highly successful.
Viacom. Short for Video and Audio Communications, Viacom was spun off by CBS in 2005. Although Viacom is headed by the estimable Les Moonves, 80 percent of the voting stock is owned by Sumner Redstone, who also owns 80 percent of the voting stock of CBS. Viacom owns Paramount Pictures, as well as MTV, Nickelodeon, and United International Pictures (a joint venture with NBC’s Universal). It also owns Spike, VH1, BET, CMT, Comedy Central, Logo, and Viva.
These six competitors do substantial business with one another. Not only do their channels carry programs produced by other corporations’ production companies, their channels are in many cases joint ventures between corporations. While there are certainly rivalries among them (Les Moonves and Jeff Zucker of NBC have famously gone at it for years), there is also shared interest in maintaining an oligopoly that has only become more obvious with centralization of cable networks under the banner of major corporations.
The best evidence of oligopoly here isn’t merely the lack of competition in programming, which is at least arguable. It’s the industry’s attempt to shut down online television, which threatens the entire cable/programming order. According to Free Press, “giant cable, satellite and phone companies and many leading programming networks, led by Comcast and Time Warner, are c
olluding on an industry-wide initiative called ‘TV Everywhere.’ . . . TV Everywhere is designed to eliminate the threat of online competition, limit consumer choice, and build on the cable TV model that gouges consumers.”71
Here’s how it works: TV Everywhere wants to prevent online users from accessing current cable channels unless they also pay subscription fees to a cable, satellite, or phone company. This plan obviously only works if the channels collude with one another—if one of the channels decides to make its content available online without subscription while the others abide by the plan, that free-riding channel will benefit from increased viewership. Hence, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “The satellite television, telecommunications and cable industries—longtime rivals—agree on one issue: The need to put TV shows that are available online, most of which are now free, behind a pay wall.” The Wall Street Journal even noted that the major communications executives were wary of crossing legal lines: “The electronic media chiefs, including [Time Warner CEO Jeffrey] Bewkes, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal and Philippe P. Dauman of Viacom, among others, have been more careful, so as to avoid being accused of collusion.”72
The issue is one of control. The corporations have it. The American people don’t. And that has an impact on what is being watched all over the globe.
HOLE NUMBER THREE: PROGRAMMERS AREN’T INTERESTED IN PROFIT ALONE
The market argument assumes that the executives involved are attempting to cater to the broadest possible market in their search for profits. They aren’t. They need to get numbers, of course. But they often keep shows on the air that don’t get numbers simply because they like them.
When shows are successful, it’s difficult to tell when executives are fibbing about political motivation. After all, their job is to put hit programs on the air—if they’re performing that job, then how can they be faulted for infusion of their political beliefs?
But this investigation becomes far easier when we take a look at the unsuccessful shows that executives keep on the air. There, it’s clear that liberal shows almost universally get more of a chance than conservative shows. Executives will cite everything from positive reviews to personal faith in a show to keep it alive. Often, it boils down to politics.
Grant Tinker, head of NBC during the early 1980s, was the king of this domain. He famously kept shows alive simply because he liked them. “Too often, network programmers, with their jobs on the line, look at dismal early ratings, decide they were wrong about a show’s potential, and yank it off the air,” Tinker wrote. “But if you believe that the show the producers are delivering is as good as you hoped it would be, you must have some confidence that the audience will eventually think so, too.” Tinker actually went further—he said that low ratings could be an indicator that you had something unique.73 He acted that faith out by keeping two horrific failures alive: Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. Later, that faith would be justified. (Conversely, the argument can easily be made that if you keep something in a decent time slot long enough, it will likely find an audience.)
Hill Street had been a Fred Silverman greenlight before Silverman’s exit. And Silverman had shown similar faith in the show. Before its launch, Hill Street produced, in Silverman deputy Brandon Tartikoff’s words, “some of the worst numbers Fred or I had ever seen. To his credit, though, Fred never wavered in his loyalty to the show. . . . ‘This is something completely different,’ he said. ‘And completely different always tests badly.’ ”74
It didn’t just test badly. It bombed like the Enola Gay. It ranked eighty-third in popularity, close to the bottom of all primetime programming.75
Why did Silverman renew it? Because it had cachet. Like Al Gore, it had gravitas. As Tartikoff stated, “The television critics would, quite simply, have had us for a barbecue if we took the show off the air.”76
There is another reason. To put it in the words of Michael Kozoll, co-creator of the show, Hill Street Blues was liberal. “I guess you’d say we’re liberal,” Kozoll said of himself and partner Steven Bochco. “I guess we all feel that the government could be doing more to help ameliorate some terrible situations.” Bochco said that he thought the liberalism of the show was actually the reason the show wasn’t drawing ratings. “That could be a source of some of our ratings problems. Because there’s no other explanation for why people aren’t watching us in droves,” Bochco told Gitlin.77
Silverman was gone after that season, but in his place came Tinker. Tinker had a connection with Hill Street—he’d produced it. That basically guaranteed that he’d stick with it. And his Silverman holdover number two, Tartikoff, backed him up. Why? “In keeping with the gambling spirit, we renewed Hill Street simply because we liked it—at first simply for what it was. . . .”78
If Tinker and company kept Hill Street alive because they had faith in it, they kept St. Elsewhere alive because it was their baby. Predictably pitched as Hill Street in a Hospital, St. Elsewhere was similar to Hill Street stylistically, politically, and in terms of initial ratings. “The first season of St. Elsewhere,” he later wrote, “was brilliant creatively, but almost no one watched . . . most of our NBC decision-makers wanted to dump it. . . . ‘It’s a good show,’ I said. ‘Let’s pick it up.’ ” It didn’t hurt that Tinker’s son Mark was a writer on the show and that during the second season, Tinker’s youngest son, John, would also join the writers’ room.79
It wasn’t just Tinker, Silverman, and Tartikoff who monkeyed around with scheduling based on personal predilection despite low ratings. Bob Wood stuck with All in the Family even though it drew terrible ratings at the beginning. Similarly, M*A*S*H stayed on the air despite initial ratings that made CBS executives nauseous—largely because the executives at CBS were liberal and M*A*S*H was a militantly liberal show. Soap lost money for ABC year after year, but the network kept airing it because the executives liked it; Marcy Carsey, who initially greenlit Soap, told me she thought it was “fabulous,” an opinion shared by ABC’s executive team.80 The executives at NBC aired the 1989 made-for-television movie Roe v. Wade despite twenty-three of twenty-four advertisers dropping out.81 Brandon Stoddard, who headed all of ABC’s programming during the late 1980s, explained to me, “It depends how much passion the networks have for a show, if they hang in there.”82
The converse is also true. Successful shows get yanked off the air or censored if the executives don’t like them. Unsolved Mysteries was a highly successful series of specials for NBC, but Tartikoff refused to greenlight Unsolved Mysteries as a full series until nine individually ordered specials had rated well. Similarly, Tartikoff treated one of NBC’s few hit shows, The A-Team, with utter scorn, according to series star Dwight Schultz, because it wasn’t “quality TV.”
For the latest example, take a look at the treatment of South Park. The executives who greenlit South Park clearly loved it. But when South Park veers into territory that makes them nervous—i.e., conservative territory—they censor it with impunity.
Doug Herzog, president of MTV Networks Entertainment Group, which oversees Comedy Central, admits that his programming strategy begins with his personal opinion—“We start with, do we think it’s funny? Is it funny to us? . . . Generally, if we think something’s funny, we’ll find a way to put it on television.”83 That opinion-based reasoning forced him into political territory when South Park decided to target the Islamic prophet Muhammad in April 2006. It was one thing for South Park to make fun of Jesus (in fact, it was Matt Stone’s and Trey Parker’s targeting of Jesus in their short Christmas video, Jesus vs. Santa Claus, that got them their gig on Comedy Central originally). It was something else entirely for the South Park creators to try to depict Muhammad, particularly in the aftermath of the Muslim world’s rioting over cartoons of Muhammad in Denmark. Comedy Central prohibited that depiction, releasing a statement: “In light of recent world events, we feel we made the right decision.”84
When I asked Herzog about that cen
sorship in July 2009, he replied, “I think if we had to do it all over again we would do it differently. . . . You know, there was concern that it might not be the most prudent thing to do at that time, and people were kind of losing their heads over it, I think wrongly so.” I asked Herzog whether allowing the Muhammad image would have been imprudent commercially or politically. “I think combination,” Herzog replied.85
Herzog’s liberal sensitivity clearly affected his judgment over Muhammad depictions in South Park. Despite his statement to me that he would do it differently if it ever came up again, when it did come up again, he proceeded along precisely the same lines. He censored it, provoking the ire of the South Park creators, who released a statement on their website complaining, “We do not have network approval to stream our original version of the show.”86
Compare the treatment of South Park to the treatment of All in the Family. When network executives challenged Norman Lear on All in the Family, Lear told them to shove it. He knew he had power, and he was willing to use it. He reached a sort of détente with the network censor, William Tankersley. But that wasn’t much of a surprise—Tankersley and Lear thought alike. Later in life, Tankersley reports, Lear called him up on the telephone. “ ‘I’m just calling you to tell you about the great respect I’ve had for you over the years. That’s all I want to say.’ . . . [I] told him what I thought of him as a patriot who would spend eight million dollars on one of the copies of the Declaration of Independence. And I said, ‘I hope that you’re still a good Democrat.’ He assured me that he was. So am I.”87 You can bet that same conversation wouldn’t take place between Stone and Parker and Herzog.
If political concerns drive censoring decisions, they also drive broader programming decisions. Television’s executives almost universally admit that factors other than pure profit motive drive their decision making. “Through the medium of television we try to make the world a slightly better place,” Herzog told me.88