What Is Pat Robertson's Deal?

Cable World, July 30, 2001 by Jon Lafayette

If Walt Disney Co. is to have a prayer of turning around the fortunes of Fox Family Channel, it will have to deal with Pat Robertson first. Disney last week announced it had agreed to buy the troubled Fox Family Channel and its 81 million subscribers for $3 billion, plus $2.3 billion in debt. The ABC Family Channel, as the network will be known, will air refocused programming from Disney's broadcast network, as well as other material. But the company also took on a commitment to air Robertson's The 700 Club, a religious/political chat show, three times a day. When Robertson sold his Family Channel to Fox in the late '90s, he is believed to have won a stipulation that his talk show would continue on the network for as long as he wished.

According to one former Fox Family executive, Disney will therefore face the same programming conundrum that stumped executives at Fox, which shared ownership of the channel with cartoon mogul Haim Saban. Fox executives complained bitterly that Robertson's show kept them from creating a coherent strategy for the network.

"Fox Family was doomed from the start because it's very hard to be [programmed for] kids all day and have The 700 Club in the middle of your daytime lineup, and then in prime time at 11 p.m.," a former executive said. Robertson's show would break up whatever programming momentum the network managed to build, with ratings for the hour of religious programming sliding to nearly zeros and attracting a different audience from the one they sought at other times of the day.

The former executive says Fox Family Worldwide chairman/CEO Saban "did everything he possibly could to buy Pat out of that commitment," eventually offering hundreds of millions of dollars. But Robertson turned down the money and insisted on keeping the show on the network.

"The word I hear on the street is Disney would have to pay a billion dollars to get them out of the deal," he said.

Robertson declined through a spokesman to comment for this story. However, in a statement, Michael Little, president of Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, said he was "optimistic" about the acquisition of Fox Family by Disney. "Disney has a tremendous library of family programs, which will help the viewership of the new ABC Family Channel and ultimately benefit The 700 Club," Little said.

The statement added that the change in ownership will not affect the airing of The 700 Club.

During a press conference last week in Pasadena, Calif., Disney CEO Michael Eisner said Disney will continue to honor the commitment to air The 700 Club and brushed off the notion that a relationship with Robertson was inconsistent with the company's values. He also said Robertson has not been a part of the religious right's largely ineffective efforts to protest Disney-made products that aren't seen as being family-friendly.

However, when News Corp. bought The Family Channel from Robertson's company in 1997, Disney was also interested but ultimately passed, at least in part because of Robertson, the former Fox executive says.

"News Corp. was willing to take the chance that they could convince Pat to get out or write him a check," the former Fox Family executive said. Now, Disney is "underestimating Pat," he says. "But it's not as easy as they think."

Disney has an interest in not upsetting Robertson's core constituency. If the program were discontinued, Robertson's supporters could make their unhappiness known to cable operators, who might decide that it's easier to drop the ABC Family Channel from their systems than deal with an organized consumer boycott. But insiders at Disney believe the program will be shelved eventually.

For Disney, which expects to complete the acquisition in three to four months, the purchase is a key experiment in "multiplexing"--that is, airing the same material over several different broadcast and cable properties at roughly the same time.

Two years ago, ABC fought with its broadcast affiliates over an agreement to allow the network to re-air its programming over other outlets. Now the network will finally have the venue to use that new latitude. The channel will also use programming from Disney's other cable services, such as The Disney Channel and ESPN, which recently announced an effort to step up production of original shows.

Eisner said that airing programs over multiple distribution platforms is the only way to sustain big-budget shows. "With the proliferation of channels, individual channel ratings get reduced every year," he said. "If you want to not have 200 channels of just inferior programming, you have to have an economic structure [where] you are able to take programming that costs a lot of money and show it over multiple screens," he said.

For Fox, the sale of Fox Family constitutes a major defeat. When it purchased the Family Channel, News Corp. wanted to become a larger player in the children's television business and compete with Disney and Viacom's Nickelodeon.

But the growth in the ad marketplace for kids programming stalled shortly after the deal was made. In prime time, second runs of the Fox broadcast network's edgier fare would never have been a good fit for the Fox Family Channel. "Fox Family was kind of an oxymoron," said one insider.