Will new cable cornucopia empower or anesthetize?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 30, 1997 | by John Berlau

Couch spuds rejoice: Although hobbled slightly by federal regulations, entrepreneurs are keeping up with viewing demand, expanding the menu of cable shows to include offering like the Anti-Aging Channel.

In the mid-eighties, the offbeat singer-songwriter "Weird Al" Yankovic cut a song for his album Dare to be Stupid about a man who drifted into a state of euphoria after subscribing to cable television. In the song "Cable TV," Weird Al boasts that he has "83 channels of ecstasy" and can watch "the Siamese faith-healers network, the news and weather from Peru, celebrity hockey, the racquet-ball channel too, Bugs Bunny direct from Atlanta, Mr. Wizard is on at 5," and, to top it all off, he has "a satellite dish on the trunk of my car so I can watch MTV while I drive."

Although at the time of the recording Weird Al was exaggerating the diversity of cable programming, his lyrics now read like prophecies of the information age. People may not be crashing their cars while watching MTV as they drive to work, but many homes have access to more than 150 channels ranging from the attractive Nostalgia Channel to Animal Planet.

Take sports, for instance. "Sports is very hot on cable right now," says Jim Cooper, programming editor of Cablevision magazine. "ESPN has been and still remains the dominant player, but now you have all these niche networks out there looking to get an audience. ESPN has spun off two networks of its own: ESPN2, which is looking to hit that gen-X extreme-sports male audience as wen as [audiences for] auto racing and hockey, and ESPNews, which is their news network. You also have Turner [Broadcasting] with their new CNN/SI [Sports Illustrated] news network." Cooper continues, "Then you have networks that are looking to hit the nostalgia niche. You have something called Classic Sports, a new network that is using old sports programming such as Muhammad Ali fighting. That's been pretty popular. There's been another network that was launched recently called American Sports Classics, which is basically the same thing, and they compete for viewers of those reruns of old sports stuff."

There may not yet be a racquet-ball channel as mentioned in Weird Al's song, but many cable viewers now can tune in to the grassy links. "The Golf Channel brings in a lot of foreign golf tournaments that are really terrific," Bob Sutton, the network's former chief executive officer, tells Insight. "The Golf Channel did a lot of coverage on Tiger Woods before he really became famous. It's a niche channel, and a lot of people Me it."

Sutton has helped build other niche channels. Before the Golf Channel he was CEO of the Home Shopping Network, which he says "gave the American people another way to shop for a good product." Now Sutton is CEO of another network that interacts heavily with viewers through telephone calls, but instead of marketing merchandise, this network sells conservative ideas.

Sutton says that the audience of NET, originally cared National Empowerment Television, has grown from about 300,000 to as many as 12 million viewers since it was founded by conservative activist Paul Weyrich in 1993. It is carried throughout the United States in about 15 cable systems and through EchoStar's dish-network satellite service. NET prides itself on being an interactive network, airing 50 hours of live programming a week and fielding as many as 18,000 viewer telephone calls per month.

"People like to have a congressman or a mover and shaker for the cameras live so they can either ask him a question or grill him." says Brad Keena, cohost of NET'S Capitol Watch and Next Revolution. "It allows America to tell Washington what America thinks." For example, former Clinton adviser Dick Morris was roasted by viewers who didn't like his adultery, and Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, who was undecided about ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention, was urged by callers to vote against it. Keena recalls that Grassley was called to vote on the treaty in the middle of Weyrich's Direct Line show. "Paul had wisely made an agreement with him that if he should be cared away, would he agree to come back to the show as soon as he had voted, and the senator says yes. He comes back and Paul, never ceasing to seize the opportunity, asks, 'How did

Real life is attracting audiences on cable-television networks such as C-Span, left, Court TV, center, and the History Channel. This compelling programming is attracting a growing niche audience. you vote?' and Grassley says, 'Well, I voted against it,"' Keena says. "My theory is Paul ought to get the neutral senators before crucial votes, put them before our audience and then (presumably) as long as they come back, they'll vote the right way."

The cable pioneer in letting America "talk back" to Washington and its political figures is C-Span. "We were the first network ever to have a call-in show on television," says founder and CEO Brian Lamb. "It really hasn't changed much from the first day we had a call-in show in 1980. It's meant to be the voice of the American people that are interested in calling.... It's uninterrupted, basically, and you get to hear people complete their thoughts. Today, this is still the only network that has that kind of a dialogue with the average citizen. There are other call-in shows, but not to the point where the caller has a lot to say about the issue or gets to ask a lot of questions of the individual guest."